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  THE TRIAL OF CHRIST
  by Alexander Innes
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Innes's scholarly legal examination of the trials of Jesus before both Jewish
and Roman courts, combining biblical and historical evidence with knowledge of
Jewish jurisprudence to demonstrate the irregularities and illegalities in the
proceedings that condemned Christ.

  Chapters: 4

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00 The Trial of Christ
    2. 00f Foreword
    3. 01 The Trial of Christ
    4. 02 Roman Trial

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  CHAPTER 1: 00 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST
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THE TRIAL OF CHRIST by Alexander Innes


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  CHAPTER 2: 00F FOREWORD
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The two works reprinted here in a single volume were written by a Scot and an
Englishman respectively. Both were barristers, and both felt that a need existed
to explain the facts surrounding the trial of Christ. Their treatises
(complimentary in nature in that they deal with the same factual data from
different points of view) ably blend biblical and historical evidence with an
astute knowledge of Jewish jurisprudence. Both works also vindicate the
evangelical belief in the uniqueness of the person of Jesus Christ and His
atoning death from the culminous attacks of those who have propounded contrary
theories.

These books together comprise a work of extraordinary value which no serious
student of the Scriptures can afford to be without!

Alexander Taylor Innes (1833-1912) earned justifiable fame for his brilliance as
an advocate and skill as a church historian. He authored the widely acclaimed
Church and State as well as his Trial of Jesus Christ : A Legal Monograph . This
latter work first appeared in 1899 and, while it is frequently quoted by
scholars in footnotes, has become extremely rare.

Following a brief introduction, Mr. Innes treats with consummate skill the
Hebrew and Roman trials of Christ. He demonstrates from biblical and historical
data the many irregularities and illegalities of both trials, and shows how the
evil inclinations of men (supposedly committed to upholding the law) led them to
manipulate different aspects of the proceedings in order to gain the verdict
they desired. No one can read this resume and remain unmoved by what transpired
in Jerusalem on the eve of the crucifixion.

Frank John Powell, author of The Trial of Jesus Christ , was born in 1901. In
the course of his illustrious career he was elevated to the position of
Metropolitan Magistrate and became a member of the Middle Temple, London. In
this able apologetic, Mr. Powell begins by setting the stage for his readers. He
writes: The story of the double “trial.” i.e. the proceedings before the Jewish
court and the Roman trial before Pilate, as related in the Gospels, is one which
can be read in a few minutes; but to appreciate the significance of the
incidents which occurred, the clash of personalities, the attitude of Jesus to
His accusers and their accusations, and, above all, the reasons for His
rejection by Israel, it is necessary to consider the historical background, the
state of national opinion in Palestine, the laws by which the Jewish and Roman
courts, respectively, were bound and the personal history of the chief
characters concerned.

Mr. Powell then recreates the events leading up to the seizure of Jesus of
Nazareth and, as in the monograph by Mr. Innes, reviews the events of both
Hebrew and Roman trials. Of value to readers is Frank Powell’s culling of
relevant information from The Mishnah as well as citations from sources
published after the printing of Taylor Innes’ work. The result to the reader of
these learned and impartial digests — works without a parallel in English
literature — is a firmer grasp and a clearer understanding of “the grace of God
[which] has appeared, bringing salvation to all men” (Titus 2:11). No committed
Christian can afford to be ignorant of these facts supporting the rejection of
Christ and His substitutionary death. We are most grateful, therefore, that the
publisher has seen fit to reproduce these works in this present volume. C. J.
Barber


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  CHAPTER 3: 01 THE TRIAL OF CHRIST
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MEN have too much forgotten that the central event in history assumed the form
of a judicial trial. The prodigious influence of the life and personality of
Jesus of Nazareth is admitted by all. But His tragical death, early and
passionately accepted by Christianity as the significant fact of His career, has
become more than any other incident the starting-point of modern history — His
tomb, as Lamartine put it, was the grave of the old world and the cradle of the
new.

Yet that memorable transaction was the execution of a capital sentence,
proceeding upon a twofold criminal trial — upon one process conducted under
Hebrew and one under Roman law. In its forensic aspect, as in some others, it is
peculiar — perhaps unique.

There have been many judicial tragedies recorded in history. Capital trials,
like those of Socrates, of Charles of England, and of Mary of Scotland, have
always had a fascination for men. And this trial has impressed and attracted the
world more than ally or all of these. But these pages recall to general readers
— what scholars have long known — that it has in addition a purely legal
interest which no one of them possesses. By common consent of lawyers, the most
august of all jurisprudences is that of ancient Rome. But perhaps the most
peculiar of all jurisprudences, and in the eyes of Christendom the most
venerable as well as peculiar, is that of the Jewish Commonwealth. And whenever
these two famous and diverse systems happen for a moment to intersect each
other, the investigation, from a legal point of view, of the transaction in
which they meet is necessarily interesting. But when the two systems meet in the
most striking and influential event that has ever happened, its investigation at
once becomes not only interesting, but important. It becomes, undoubtedly, the
most interesting isolated problem which historical jurisprudence can present.
And the problem is not only interesting, but difficult. For questions such as
the following are at once raised: — Were there two trials, or only one? Was the
second a mere review of the first, or was the first a mere preliminary to the
second?

Farther, were the forms, in the one case of Hebrew, in the other of Roman, law
observed, or attempted to be observed? And was there in either case an attempt,
with or without form, to attain substantial justice?

Again, were the charges preferred before the Hebrew and Roman tribunals the
same, or nearly so? What was the crime for which the accused died.

Lastly, as to the decision. Was it in either case right in form, and attained by
steps in conformity with the process which was binding (or was observed) at the
time? And was it right in substance, i .e . was it, if not just, at least legal
— in conformity with the Hebrew law, or the Roman law, as those laws then stood?

These questions of law proceed of course upon an assumed or ascertained history
of fact. The history is abundantly familiar; and, fortunately, there is no
special necessity that we should commence this inquiry by an examination of the
sources. Men are not agreed how far back they can exactly trace the three
Gospels on the one hand, or the Fourth Gospel of John on the other. But the
detail, verisimilitude, and authoritative calm of all these documents, impress
the reader with a sense of close proximity to the life narrated — proximity, at
least, on the part of the original oral narrators. And they have no competitors.
A few words in Tacitus, a disputed sentence or two in Josephus, occasional
execrations scattered throughout the Talmud, — these and such as these are the
outside references to a career which burned itself in detail into the hearts of
a generation of surviving disciples, and thence into the imagination of the
world. To some readers it will appear a singular advantage that, so far as the
documents bear on this special legal question, there is no reference to miracle.
In none of the four records of the trial is there (after the first arrest) any
touch of the supernatural in that sense of the word. The whole narrative of
external fact might have been told of any morning’s work of the Sanhedrin, of
any forenoon condemnation by the Procurator. We may not indeed stretch this too
far. The judicial narrative, unbroken by actual portent or marvel, maintains in
each Gospel the same tone of supernatural consciousness which in previous pages,
apparently without surprise or break or sense of effort, passes into actual
external miracle. Yet it remains true that in the fragment of fourfold history
with which we at present deal, there is nothing which the most determined enemy
of the supernatural needs to question. In truth, the incidents of the trial are
most natural and probable, and, in so far as the traditions agree, there seems
no excuse for doubting the history. Of course the four do not agree in all
details, here or elsewhere. The variations in the utterances reported by
different Gospels warn readers to expect a similar independence in narration of
facts. And sometimes this cuts deep into the history, as in the matter of
chronology. A doubt exists even as to the number of years during which the
prophetic ministry lasted which this trial was now to close. A similar question
has been raised as to the hours occupied by the tragic execution which followed
on this very day. Neither of these points, however, directly concerns the legal
side of the trial. We do not need to solve even the still more famous and
ancient problem, whether the death took place on the 14th or the 15th day of
Nisan — the day before, or the day after, the Passover. For, whatever day it
was, no one doubts that such a death, proceeding upon a Roman sentence, actually
took place on the Friday of that week. Nor is it doubted by anyone; or that the
Roman sentence and execution followed upon an arrest which happened on the
immediately preceding night — so that the Hebrew judicial proceedings, whatever
these were, must have been interposed between the previous sunset and that
morning session in the Praetorium. The chronological difficulties, even when
they are outside of the actual trial, will no doubt ultimately affect the
relative value of our sources. Yet it must be remembered that even if one of the
Gospels were shown to be irreconcilable with the others, and with history — say,
in a chronological matter contemporaneous with that of which we here treat — it
does not by any means at once follow that its narrative of the trial itself may
not have high historic value. Each tradition or narration, and each part of it,
must be looked at upon its own merits; and when criticism has settled the weight
of apostolic or contemporary authority which belongs to each, the resulting
stereoscope (at present somewhat blurred in the superimposition) will finally
take solid shape. Meantime a lawyer, who is not himself also a critic, may
remark that the mere independence of two or more narratives by no means tends to
suggest doubt as to the story they convey. And while their variations, in so far
as these affect the legal question before us, will call for careful
consideration, we shall find that the basis of fact is on the whole
satisfactory.

I give on a following page the fourfold narrative of the Hebrew, as subsequently
of the Roman, trial. And to allow readers closer access to the original, I take
the English from the Revised Version. THE HEBREW TRIAL “Thou, if Thou wast He,
who at midnight came By the star-light, naming a dubious name! And if, too heavy
with sleep, too rash With fear — O Thou, if that martyr-gash Fell on Thee coming
to take Thine own, And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne.”

Robert Browning’s “Holy-Cross Day.” THE FOUR NARRATIVES.

MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve,
came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief
priests and elders of the people. . . Then they came and laid hands on Jesus,
and took him. . .In that hour said Jesus to the multitudes, Are ye come out as
against a robber with swords and staves to seize me? I sat daily And
straightway, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a
multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the
elders. . . And they laid hands on him, and took him. . . And Jesus answered and
said unto them, Are ye come out, as against a robber, with swords and staves to
seize me? I was daily with you in the While he yet spake, behold, a multitude,
and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and he drew
near unto Jesus to kiss him. . .And Jesus said unto the chief priests, and
captains of the temple, and elders, which were come against him, Are ye come
out, as against a robber, with swords and staves? When I was daily with Judas
then, having received the band of soldiers, and officers from the chief priests
and the Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. . .So
the band and the chief captain and the officers of the Jews, seized Jesus and
bound him, and led him to Annas first; for he was father in-law to Caiaphas,
which was high priest that year. Now teaching in the temple, and ye took me not.
. . And they that had taken Jesus led him away to the house of Caiaphas the high
priest, where the scribes and the elders were gathered together. . . Now the
chief priests and the whole council sought false witness against Jesus, that
they might put him to death; and they found it not, though many false witnesses
came. But afterward came two, and said, This man said, I am able to destroy the
temple of God, and to build it ill three days. And the high priest stood up, and
said unto him, temple teaching, and ye took me not: but this is done that the
scriptures might be fulfilled. . . And they led Jesus away to the high priest:
and there come together with him all the chief priests and the elders and the
scribes. ·. Now the chief priests and the whole council sought witness against
Jesus to put him to death; and found it not. For many bare false witness against
him, and their witness agreed not together. And there stood up certain, and bare
false witness against him, saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple
that is made with hands, and within three days I will build you in the temple,
ye stretched not forth your hands against me: but this is your hour, and the
power of darkness. And they seized him, and led him away, and brought him into
the high priest’s house. . . And the men that held Jesus mocked him, and beat
him. And they blindfolded him, and asked him, saying, Prophesy: who is it that
struck thee? And many other things spake they against him, reviling him. And as
soon as it was day, the assembly of the elders of the people was gathered
together, both chief priests and Caiaphas was he which gave counsel to the Jews,
that it was expedient that one man should die for the people. And Simon Peter
followed Jesus, and so did another disciple.

Now that disciple was known unto the high priest, and entered in with Jesus into
the court of the high priest. . .The high priest therefore asked Jesus of his
disciples, and of his teaching.

Jesus answered him, I have spoken openly to the world; I ever taught in
synagogues, and in the temple, where all the Jews come together; and in secret
spake I nothing. Why Answerest thou nothing? what is it which the these witness
against thee? But Jesus held his peace. And the high priest said unto him, I
adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the
Son of God.

Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Henceforth ye
shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the
clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his garments, saying, He hath spoken
blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye another made
without hands. And not even so did their witness agree together. And the high
priest stood up in the midst, asked Jesus, saying, Answerest thou nothing? what
is it which these witness against thee? But he held his peace, and answered
nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and saith unto him, Art thou the
Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son
of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.
And the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What further need have we of
witnesses? Ye scribes; and they led him away into their council, saying, If thou
art the Christ, tell us. But he said unto them, If I tell ye, ye will not
believe: and if I ask you , ye will not answer. But from henceforth shall the
Son of man be seated at the right hand of the power of God. And they all said,
Art thou then the Son of God? And he said unto them, Ye say that I am. And they
said, What further need have we of witness? for we ourselves have heard from his
own mouth. And the whole company of them rose up, and brought him before Pilate.
askest thou me? ask them that have heard me, what I spake unto them: behold,
these know the things which I said. And when he had said this, one of the
officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand, saying, Answerest thou the high
priest so? Jesus answered him, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil:
but if well, why smitest thou me? Annas therefore sent him bound unto Caiaphas
the high priest. . .

They lead Jesus therefore from Caiaphas into the palace (Praetorium): and it was
early. have heard the blasphemy: what think ye?

They answered and said, He is worthy of death.

Then did they spit in his face and buffet him; and some smote him with the palms
of their hands, saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ: who is he that struck
thee?. . .

Now when morning was come, all the chief priests and the elders of the people
took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: and they bound him, and led him
away, and delivered him up to Pilate the governor. have heard the blasphemy:
what think ye? And they all condemned him to be worthy of death. And some began
to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say unto him,
Prophesy: and the officers received him with blows of their hands. . .And
straightway in the morning the chief priests with the elders and scribes, and
the whole council, held a consultation, and bound Jesus, and carried him away,
and delivered him up to Pilate.

HEBREW TRIAL ALL modern readers know that the Hebrew commonwealth, and the
institutions which regulated it, were pervaded by a deep sentiment of justice
and law. But all are not aware of the extent to which that sentiment, and its
characteristic maxim, “Thou shalt do no unrighteousness ill judgment,” were
developed in the later history of the people. In the more ancient part of the
traditions of the Fathers, we read, “When a judge decides not according to
truth, he makes the majesty of God to depart from Israel. But if he judges
according to truth, were it only for one hour, it is as if he established the
whole world, for it is in judgment that the Divine presence in Israel has its
habitation.” It was a few years ago pointed out to English readers that that
whole vast later literature of the Jews which we call the Talmud is
“emphatically a Corpus Juris — a cyclopaedia of all law,” which may best be
judged by analogy and comparison with other legal codes, more especially with
that of Rome and its commentaries. It contains many other things, but this is
its basis. And what is more important for us to notice, is that this legal basis
is the older part. The whole Talmud consists of forty folios — a mass of
discussion, illustration, and commentary. But the central part of it, which is
comprised in twelve volumes, is called the Mishna, i .e . the Tradition. And the
Mishna is nearly wholly law. The name was indeed of old translated as the second
or oral law — the deute>rwsiv — a detailed traditional commentary on the written
law of Moses, to which it professed complete subjection, while practically
superseding it as a code. Mr. Deutsch, in striving to give English readers an
idea of the multiplicity and confusion of the Talmud, likens it to Hansard: “The
Parliamentary discussions or episodes answering to the Gemara or general
commentary, while the Bills or Acts are called the Mishna.” The distinction of
course is, that in Hansard the legislative Acts are the result and termination
of the discussions, while in the Talmud the Mishna or law is the older portion
and the starting-point.

Accordingly, while portions of the general Talmud commentary did not come into
existence for many centuries after the introduction of Christianity, the
compilation of the whole Mishna, or central portion, was begun by Rabbi Judah,
somewhere about 200 A.D. But the Rabbi founded his own views in it on those of
the earlier and famous Rabbi Meir, and goes back for his traditions through the
two Gamaliels to his own direct ancestor, Hillel, contemporary of Jesus, and
himself a gatherer of the past. And while the oral law had thus been transmitted
from mouth to mouth for centuries, two of its treatises are known to have been
gathered together a hundred years before Rabbi Judah proceeded to compile the
whole. So, when it was at last compiled, it was apparently as an oral law which
had been growing in use and authority ever since the return of the nation from
Babylon — as a “brief abstract of about eight hundred years legal production.”
Hence modern Jewish writers have referred to it without hesitation as including
the code of criminal law in existence at the date of the high-priestship of
Annas and Caiaphas. Of course this cannot be matter of demonstration in the case
of all portions of a book which was not finally reduced to writing until
centuries had passed. But the evidence shows that the development of the Mishna
in the direction of precaution against legal injustice or negligence was
exceptionally early and strong. Its earliest period coincided with the time of
“the Men of the Great Synagogue,” stretching from the Return from the Captivity
to about B.C. Their work has been summed up in the leading aphorism of the Pirke
Avoth , which runs, “Be cautious and slow in judgment, send forth many
disciples, and make a fence round the law .” And this age, which inculcated
caution in judicial action before all other things, was succeeded by the
so-called age of “the Sanhedrin,” which for the next four hundred years worked
out that caution in detail. In nothing is the Mishna more express than in the
contrast recognized at an early time between civil and criminal proceedings —
judgments “of money” and judgments “of the life.” Even with regard to the
former, its rules strike the modern legal mind as leaning to the side of
pedantic caution. But with regard to criminal, and especially to capital, cases,
there can be no doubt that long before the time of Jesus the value set by the
law upon the life of a Hebrew citizen had led to extraordinary precautions.

What have been called the four great rules of their criminal jurisprudence —
“strictness in the accusation, publicity in the discussion, full freedom granted
to the accused, and assurance against all dangers or errors of testimony” — are
carried out even in the Mishna in minute and scrupulous rules, leaning almost
ostentatiously in every point to the side of the accused. And they ruled most of
all in the case of a trial for life.

Indeed, so far does this go, that modern Jews have been disposed to represent
capital punishment as abhorrent to the whole genius of Hebrew jurisprudence. We
read in the oral law the saying of Eleazar the son of Azarias, that “the
Sanhedrin, which so often as once in seven years condemns a man to death, is a
slaughter-house.” And more startling still, when we remember the Hebrew dread of
all anthropomorphism in speaking of the Divine, is that terrible sentence of
Rabbi Meir: “What doth God say (if one may speak of God after the manner of men)
when a malefactor suffers the anguish due to his crime? He says, My head and my
limbs are pained. And if He so speaks of the suffering even of the guilty, what
must He utter when the righteous is condemned?” And so, to save the innocent
blood, to hedge round and shelter the sacred house of life, rule after rule was
laid down in successive lines of circumvallation, and presumptions in favor of
the accused were accumulated, until a false conviction became almost impossible.
Were the rules observed — was the law obeyed — in the trial of Jesus of
Nazareth? The question whether the Hebrew trial was according to their own rules
of law has perhaps not been exhaustively considered by any one writer, though it
has been touched upon by many. The most celebrated discussion upon it was raised
by a learned Spanish Jew, M. Salvador, who in 1822, in the first edition of a
work since twice republished under the title of Histoire des Institutions de
Moise , gave two careful chapters on the penal law of the later Jews and on
their administration of justice, and followed them up by a dissertation to show
that the Jugement de Jesus was according to law. He admitted the facts as stated
in the Gospels, and founded on the law as stated in the Mishna; and from these
sources professed to prove that while the result may have been unfortunate if
Jesus was really the Messiah, the process followed and the result arrived at
were alike necessary, if the tribunal adhered to its own law. Salvador was
answered in a brilliant treatise by a distinguished member of the French bar, M.
Dupin (aine). He, however (like an able American writer, Mr. Greenleaf), devoted
himself rather to the substantial injustice of the trial than to its form
according to the jurisprudence concerned; and in the third edition of his
Institutions , published in 1862, Salvador maintains and reprints the whole
positions originally laid down. His argument, however, falls short of its
conclusion on the most essential points, so obviously, that to make it the basis
of discussion would be one-sided and unfair. I propose, therefore, to treat the
question independently, in so far as one who has no pretensions to Hebrew
learning can deal with ascertainable fact on the basis of admitted law and
underlying justice. On a Thursday night in that month of March, the Thursday
towards the end of the Passover Week, unquestionably took place the arrest — the
first step before most modern trials. The question has been raised whether the
arrest was legal. There is no reason to doubt that it was by authority of the
High Priest; and the addition of a Roman speira to the officers of the temple
must have been procured by Jewish authority. But was arrest before trial at all
a lawful proceeding by Jewish law, no matter under how high an authority? It
seems not to have been so, unless resistance or escape was apprehended. In this
case no escape was intended, but resistance, though not intended, was possible,
and the lawfulness of the mere arrest need not therefore be questioned. What is
more important is what immediately followed the capture, for this raises the
question whether the intention of the captors, the arrest at nightfall was to be
the preface to a regular trial. Had that been their intention, their legal
course was plain. It was that followed a little later by the captors of Peter
and John, who “put them in ward until the next day, because it was now
eventide.” It was to be otherwise here. An examination by night followed the
arrest. Jesus was first led by His armed escort to the presence of Annas, by far
the most influential member of the Sanhedrin. For in that body there now sat no
less than five of his sons, all of whom either had held, or were in a few years
to hold, the supreme dignity of High Priest. The old man had exercised that
great office twenty years before, and had, in the absence of the Roman governor,
stretched his powers, as one of his sons afterwards did, perhaps to the extent
of carrying out capital sentences. At all events, the indignant Procurator had
insisted on his removal from office; but though Annas gave a formal consent, he
merely transferred the chair of the great Council to the younger members of his
family. It was now held by his energetic son-inlaw, Caiaphas, the aged head of
the house remaining, in the estimation of orthodox Jews, the de jure High
Priest. By Annas Jesus was Sent bound to Caiaphas, perhaps only to another
department of the sacerdotal palace. But before one or other of these princes of
the Church the accused was certainly subjected to a preliminary investigation
before any witnesses were called.

It is extremely difficult to decide whether this examination by “the High
Priest,” recorded by John alone, was made by Annas or by Caiaphas — so difficult
that it is fortunate that scarcely any legal question turns upon the point. The
chief result of our decision of it will be its bearing on the proceedings which
followed, the same night. For if the examination detailed by John took place
before Annas, it was separated by an interval of place, and also of time, from
the subsequent proceedings before Caiaphas. In that case it is more probable
that the examination of witnesses, the confession, and condemnation which took
place before the younger and titular High Priest were somewhat later in the
night, or even towards morning, and followed the form and order of a regular
public trial. If, on the other hand, Annas at once sent on the prisoner to
Caiaphas, and if the examination recorded was by the latter, it may have been
immediately followed by the production of witnesses, and by the adjuration and
condemnation; and in this case it is likely that a considerable interval
succeeded these proceedings before a formal or public meeting of Council in the
morning confirmed the informal condemnation of the night. But the main point
with regard to the High Priest’s examination is independent of the question who
the examiner was. It appears in any case to have been wholly illegal. In some
countries — in France, for example, and in Scotland — the accused is led before
a magistrate, and subjected to private official interrogatories before he is
remitted to his public trial. In others, and in the Hebrew law, it is not so. It
was there the right of the accused to be free from all such private or personal
investigation until he was brought for trial before his congregated brethren.
This rule of publicity seems to have been derived from principles both as to
judges and witnesses. “Be not a sole judge,” was one of the most famous
aphorisms, “for there is no sole judge but One.” Still more clear was it, not
from the Mishna only, but from the Pentateuch, that there was to be no such
thing as a sole witness; and that the “two or three witnesses” at whose mouth
every matter must be established must appear publicly to give their testimony. (
Deuteronomy 19:15-18.) Their deposition was the beginning of every proceeding;
and until it was publicly given against a man, he was held to be in the judgment
of law not merely innocent, but unaccused.

It is this principle which gives the fullest explanation of the answers of Jesus
of Nazareth to the midnight questions of the High Priest. The ecclesiastical
magistrate, probably sitting alone, and certainly sitting privately and during
the night, and before as yet any witnesses were called, asked Jesus of His
disciples and of His doctrine. “Jesus answered him, I have spoken openly to the
world; I ever taught in synagogues, and in the temple, whither the Jews always
resort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me ? ask them that
have heard me , what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said.”

It was in every word the voice of pure Hebrew justice, founding upon the broad
principle of their judicial procedure, and recalling an unjust judge to the
first duty of his great office. But as one who studied that nation in older
times observed, “When a vile man is exalted, the wicked walk on every side”
around him; and when the accused had thus claimed his rights, one of the
officers of court — a class usually specially alive to the observance of form,
and of that alone — “struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest
thou the High Priest so?” The reply of Jesus is exceedingly striking. In it He
again resolutely took His stand on the platform of the legal rights of a Hebrew
— a ground from which He afterwards rose to a higher, but which He certainly
never abandoned: “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well,
why smitest thou me?” The words are, no doubt, a protest for freedom of speech
and liberty to the accused. But, they appeal again to the same principle of the
Hebrew law — that by which witnesses took upon themselves the whole burden and
responsibility, and especially the whole initiative, of every accusation, even
as they were obliged to appear at the close, and with their own hands to hurl
the stones. And the renewed protest was so far effectual. For now the witnesses
came forward, or, at least, they were summoned to bear their testimony; and only
when they carne forward can a formal trial, according to Hebrew law, be said to
have commenced. But did not all this take place by night? And was a trial by
night legal? On the question of fact whether the trial took place by night or in
the morning, it will be found on turning back to their narratives that the four
Evangelists give a confused account of what took place. Matthew and Mark,
omitting the seemingly private interrogation of which we have already spoken,
distinctly narrate a double and very striking trial by night — first by
witnesses, and then by an attempt to obtain a confession; but all before the
High Priest, the scribes, and the elders, to whom Mark adds, “all the chief
priests.” Their narrative reads as if the first part of this trial might have
taken place almost as soon as the prisoner was brought from the Mount of Olives.
At all events, in their narrative it took place by night, while in the morning
there was a second and separate “consultation” of a similar, but seemingly
larger and more authoritative, meeting. John, on the other hand, narrates the
interrogation by the High Priest, the transfer from Annas to Caiaphas, and the
delivery to Pilate in the morning, but does not allude to any trial before the
Council. These two representations, though not contradictory, are unsatisfactory
and inconsistent; and the tradition of Luke, which differs from both, completes
the confusion, but helps us to a result. He omits the earlier part of the
alleged trial — the interrogation of witnesses; but narrates the confession and
condemnation as at one meeting of the Council, which took place “as soon as it
was day,” and after which the whole company led Him to Pilate.

Putting all these representations together, there is no difficulty in arriving
at the order of the historical transactions, though there will always be
insuperable difficulty to those who insist on the exact accuracy of the
narrators on the one hand, or on the legal regularity of the proceedings on the
other. The visit to Annas and the transfer to Caiaphas came first, with the
interrogation of the accused by one or other of the High Priests. About this
earlier hour certainly took place the denial of Peter, related by all the
Evangelists, while some time must have been consumed in sending for witnesses,
and summoning either the whole Council or some members. That the whole Council
did not meet at night is unquestionable: that a certain number of them were
present by night with Caiaphas is equally clear. Assuming that there was a final
and formal meeting of the whole Sanhedrin at its usual morning hour, it is
barely possible that the vivid scene of the adjuration, confession, and sentence
took place before it. But it is much more likely on the evidence that it took
place earlier, when a considerable number, quite enough to be popularly called a
Council, were already assembled. And, in any case, it is certain that there was
a still earlier transaction — the examination of witnesses and the deliberation
on their evidence-~ and that this must have taken place some time during the
night. It will always remain doubtful whether this midnight testimony took place
before a considerable meeting of the Council or its committee on the one hand,
or before Caiaphas and a few of his friends on the other. Nor is it of much
consequence. The confusion of representation is quite natural.

For, according to all the rules of Hebrew law, such a transaction in the night
was absolutely illegal, incapable of being validly transacted in either form,
and incapable of being reported so as to produce an impression of justice upon
the minds of the people. The detailed law is laid down in a passage of the
Mishna, which contrasts capital trials with questions of money. It is so
striking that the whole paragraph may be quoted, though it is with the
concluding words that we have now to deal: — “Money trials and trials for life
have the same rules of inquiry and investigation. But they differ in procedure,
in the following points: — The former require only three, the latter
three-and-twenty judges. In the former it matters not on which side the judges
speak who give the first opinions: in the latter, those who are in favor of
acquittal must speak first. In the former, a majority of one is always enough:
in the latter, a majority of one is enough to acquit, but it requires a majority
of two to condemn. In the former, a decision may be quashed on review (for
error), no matter which way it has gone in the latter, a condemnation may be
quashed, but not an acquittal. In the former, disciples of the law present in
the court may speak (as assessors) on either side: in the latter, they may speak
in favor of the accused, but not against him. In the former, a judge who has
indicated his opinion, no matter on which side, may change his mind: in the
latter, he who has given his voice for guilt may change his mind, but not he who
has given his voice for acquittal. The former (money trials)are commenced only
in the daytime, but may be concluded after nightfall: the latter (capital
trials) are commenced only in the daytime, and must also be concluded during the
day. The former way be concluded by acquittal or condemnation on the day on
which they have begun: the latter may be concluded on that day if there is a
sentence acquittal, but must be postponed to a second day if there is to be a
condemnation. And for this reason capital trials are not held on the day before
a Sabbath or a feastday.” The crucifixion of Jesus took place, as has scarcely
ever been doubted, on the Friday, the day before a Sabbath which was also “an
high day”; and this meeting of the Council took place on the same Friday
morning. Such a meeting on such a day was forbidden. If indeed it only met to
register an acquittal, it was lawful. But if the court was unable at once to
acquit, it, was bound to adjourn for at least twelve hours before meeting for
final judgment, and such a final meeting could not be on the Sabbath. The
necessity of the adjournment of a capital trial to secure the rights of the
accused is shown very clearly by the detailed regulations of the Mishna: — “If a
man is found innocent, the court absolves him. But if not, his judgment is put
off to the following day. Meantime the judges meet together, and, eating little
meat, and drinking no wine during that whole day, they confer upon the cause. On
the following morning they return into court” and vote over again, with the like
precautions as before. . . “If judgment is at last pronounced, they bring out
the man sentenced, to stone him. The place of punishment is to be apart front
the place of judgment (for it is said in Leviticus 24:14, ‘Bring the blasphemer
without the camp’). In the meantime an officer is to stand at the door of the
court with a handkerchief in his hand; another, mounted on horseback, follows
the procession so far, but halts at the farthest point where he can see the man
with the handkerchief. [The judges remain sitting], and if anyone offers himself
to prove that the condemned man is innocent, he at the door waves the
handkerchief, and the horseman instantly gallops after the condemned and recalls
him for his defense.” These regulations, taken not from the commentary on the
oral law, but from the Mishna itself, may have existed in full detail during the
highpriesthood of Caiaphas. There is no reason to doubt that at least the
general rule, which prescribes adjourning the trial from daylight to daylight,
bound the judges of Jesus of Nazareth. In no case was such a rule so absolutely
necessary to justice, as where the accused, arrested after nightfall, had been
put upon his trial by daybreak, without the least opportunity of summoning
witnesses for his defense. But what the Gemara describes as the atrocity of thus
anticipating the day of death of the accused, was exceeded in open injustice by
the earlier outrage of commencing, and probably substantially concluding, the
real trial under cloud of night. That would have been an intolerable scandal
even in the case of an ordinary civil suit. Such a suit could only be called and
commenced during the day, though upon occasion it might be prolonged after the
shadows had fallen until a verdict were returned. But a grave criminal case —
certainly a capital case of crime — was always to be begun., and resumed or
continued, and finished, only in the light of day. And that, of all criminal
cases, a trial in which a son of Israel, acknowledged to be mighty in deed and
word before all the people, was to be judged for his life. . . that such a trial
should be begun and finished and sentence formally pronounced, between midnight
and morning, was a violence done to the forms and rules of Hebrew law as well as
to the principles of justice. Yet there can be no doubt that at some untimely
hour, between Thursday night and Friday morning, the form, and somewhat more
than the form, of a trial by Hebrew law did take place. The judges, unjust as
they were, were men trained in that law of minute scruples and mighty sanctions;
and we may be sure that they would have felt it impossible to dispense with
process and form altogether. The last words we caught from Jesus were His demand
for open accusation and trial: “Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me.”
And we shall hear no further utterance until the close. For when this demand for
public justice was met by a nocturnal trial, the accused declined to take part
in it. Meantime much was going on. The members of the Council present sought for
witness against Jesus.

Matthew says they sought for false witness. But even the former was a scandalous
indecorum. Hebrew judges, as we have seen, were eminently counsel for the
accused. And one of the strangest sights the world has ever seen must have been
the adjuration or solemn address to the witnesses who came to speak against the
life of Jesus, by the magistrate who had — no doubt with perfect sincerity —
held it expedient that one man should die for the people. In our Courts an oath
means a solemn undertaking by the witness, in the presence of God and the
magistrate, to tell the truth. In the Hebrew Courts it was all adjuration by the
magistrate of the witness as standing in God’s presence. That form of adjuration
or solemn appeal still exists in the body of the law. It was the duty of the
High Priest to pronounce it to each witness in a capital ease, and so to put
them on oath. Who can measure the force of its utterance on this occasion by the
sacred Judge of Israel upon the men who, while words such as these uttered, were
forced to gaze into the face of those whose life it guarded? “Forget not, O
witness, that it is one thing to give evidence in a trial as to money, and
another in a trial for life. In a money suit, if thy witness-bearing shall do
wrong, money may repair that wrong. But in this trial for life, if thou sinnest,
the blood of the accused, and the blood of his seed to the end of time, shall be
imputed unto thee. . . Therefore was Adam created one man and alone, to teach
thee, that if any witness shall destroy one soul out of Israel, he is held by
the Scripture to be as if he had destroyed the world; and he who saves one such
soul to be as if he had saved the world. . . For a man, from one signet-ring,
may strike off many impressions, and all of them shall be exactly alike. But He,
the King of the kings of kings, He the Holy and the Blessed, has struck off from
his type of the first man the forms of all men that shall live; yet so, that no
one human being is wholly alike to any other. Wherefore let us think and believe
that the whole world is created for a man [such as he whose life hangs on thy
words].” The Son of Man, whose life was surrounded by the law with this
tremendous sanction, stood silent before those witnesses; and, whatever was the
reason, the narrative records that their testimony against him failed. Let us
therefore refer now to the Hebrew law of evidence. The Talmud divides all oral
evidence into — 1. A vain testimony. 2. A standing testimony. 3. An “equal” or
adequate testimony; or (perhaps) the testimony of them that agree together (ijsh
marturia ). The evidence of the earlier witnesses who on that night were
examined seems to have been set aside as belonging to the first class; for a
“vain testimony” was not even accepted provisionally — was not retained until
afterwards confirmed. A “standing testimony,” on the other hand, was admitted in
the meantime and provisionally, but not held valid until confirmed by others. To
this intermediate rank attained the evidence of that witness who at length came
forward to speak to the early utterance of Jesus about the destruction and
rebuilding of the temple. And when following him another came, the question was
at once raised whether the testimony of both did not amount to the third and
complete order of evidence, known as “the testimony of them that agree
together.” “But not even so,” says Mark, using the exact technical term — “not
even so did their witness agree together.” This may undoubtedly have been a mere
discrepancy in their narration of facts. That discrepancy cannot have been
great, according to our modern ideas. For Mark gives the evidence of both in one
indiscriminating sentence. And Matthew does the same in another sentence,
slightly different. Neither of them makes any explicit distinction between what
the two witnesses said. Let us suppose that the discrepancy between the two
(alleged by Mark) amounted only to this, that the one said, in Matthew’s phrase,
“I am able to destroy the temple of God,” and the other, “I will destroy this
temple.” It is by no means clear that even such a difference as this might not
have been sufficient to nullify their testimony. For in a Hebrew criminal trial
“the least discordance between the evidence of the witnesses was held to destroy
its value”; and this rule, like others, was pushed to that childish extreme
which we now call Judaical. A mere verbal distinction may have sometimes been a
fatal objection in the mind of even such a judge as Caiaphas. But the evidence
of men who are not reported to have said anything extreme against the accused,
but whom the Evangelists, departing, from their usual reserve, distinctly call
“false witnesses,” was probably reckless and inaccurate, and so discordant upon
the face of it. It is just possible, indeed, that the variation between the
reports of the two Evangelists covers not a mere verbal distinction, but a
substantial and serious difficulty, of great importance for the conduct of the
case. For at this point, we are confronted by one of the most important
questions in the whole inquiry, What was the crime for which Jesus was all this
time being tried? What was the charge, what the indictment, upon which He stood
before the Council? Up to this point we have had no intimation on that subject.
In modern times that would be an extraordinary state of matters. To try a man,
especially for his life, without specifying beforehand the crime on which he is
to be tried, is justly held to be an outrage. Some of the greatest events in
English constitutional history turn on the illegality of “general warrants” —
the illegality, that is, not of trying a man without specifying his crime the
most arbitrary of our kings did not venture to do that — but of even committing
him for trial, without specifying his accusation in the warrant of committal.
But we must not judge Jewish law, or indeed early law of any nation, by our
modern rules.

Hebrew law, as we have seen, gave a peculiarly important position to the
witnesses. I believe we shall not fully realize that position unless we remember
that, at least in the earlier days of that law, the evidence of the leading
witnesses constituted the charge . There was no other charge: no more formal
indictment. Until they spoke, and spoke in the public assembly, the prisoner was
scarcely an accused man. When they spoke, and the evidence of the two agreed
together, it formed the legal charge, libel, or indictment, as well as the
evidence for its truth. This, to us paradoxical, but really simple and natural
origin of a Hebrew criminal process, is nowhere better illustrated than in that
ancient cause celebre of Naboth the Jezreelite. “They proclaimed a fast, and set
Naboth on high among the people. And there came in two men, children of Belial,
and sat before him; and the men of Belial witnessed against him, even against
Naboth, in the presence of the people, saying, Naboth did blaspheme God and the
king. Then they carried him forth out of the city, and stoned him with stones,
that he died.” The essential points of a Hebrew trial for life are here given
with admirable terseness. But in the case of Naboth the false witnesses suborned
by the Sidonian queen are represented as using the technical word, or nomen
juris , of blasphemy. In the trial of Jesus the only witnesses distinctly spoken
to reported a particular utter trace of the accused. What crime was this
utterance intended by the accusers, or the judges, to infer?

There are two distinct meanings which may have been innuendoed .

According to one of them, the words, “I will destroy this temple that is made
with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands,” may
have been represented as the voice of one come to attack the existing
institutions — to “destroy the law and the prophets.” We have a most important
commentary on this in the parallel accusation of Stephen a few months later’ “We
have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and
shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.” But, according to another
view, the same reported utterance — especially in the modified form of Matthew,
“I am able to destroy the temple of God” — may have been intended as a charge of
arrogating superhuman power. So His original auditors felt it. “Forty-and-six
years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it again in three days?”
The two charges, it will be observed, though very distinct, are not
inconsistent. May He not have been charged both with attempting to change the
national institutions and with pretensions to miraculous power? The difficulty
in this twofold supposition is that we have been seeking in these charges for
the one crime upon which Jesus was finally condemned. But if we look more
narrowly at the supposed difficulty, we may find what we have been seeking.
Jesus was finally condemned for “blasphemy,” because He made Himself the Messiah
and the Son of God, making thus higher personal claims than even the witnesses
against Him had suggested. That was the crime, therefore, towards which one of
the intended accusations — that as to superhuman power — may be held to have
pointed. But what of the other, the attack upon Jewish institutions? The
unexpected but satisfactory answer is, that such a charge may have fallen under
precisely the same legal category, or nomen juris — that of blasphemy. This
might be suggested to us even by the witnesses against Stephen, who describe as
“blasphemous words” the deliberate utterances of the deacon as to the passing
away of the holy place and the law. But I believe that it will be found there is
no Hebrew category of crime under which the attempt to supersede the old
institutions could so naturally come, as that which is here denoted by the term
blasphemy. The witnesses, therefore, may have had this accusation somewhat in
view from the beginning. The judges almost certainly had. And it is not too soon
to devote a few sentences to the question what a legal word so important for our
inquiry properly includes.

Blasphemy is not mere profanity. It is profanity which, as the name imports,
strikes directly against God. This is the original sense of the word, and it is
that to which we have returned in modern days. But throughout the countries of
Europe ruled by civil and canon law, blasphemy has long since taken on a
secondary and constructive meaning.

It stands in their law-books at the head of the enumeration of crimes as
“Treason against the Deity,” taking precedence even of treason against the
State. And this crimen laesae majestatis divinae , like the crime of treason
against earthly rulers, has often, under the head of constructive treason, taken
great and dangerous latitude. Now whether it is a necessary thing for ordinary
nations and jurisprudences to have in their statute-book such a crime as treason
against God at all, we need not inquire. One thing is certain. In the Hebrew
commonwealth and under Hebrew law it was necessary. For that commonwealth was in
theory a pure theocracy, and all its priests, prophets, judges, and kings’ were
then held to have been the mere courtiers and ministers of the invisible King,
whose word was Israel’s constitution and law. In such a constitution, blasphemy,
or the verbal renunciation of God, was in the proper sense high treason; and any
attempt to subvert the great institutions of His government was constructive
treason. By what name was such constructive treason known and tried? I think it
was probably blasphemy. Neither the crime of the “false prophet” of the true
God, nor that of “the idolater” or seducer to the worship of strange gods, seems
to have attained to the generality and eminence of the word Blasphemy in Jewish
law. That some such word was used in the age of Caiaphas to designate
constructive treasons — attempts against the Divine system of religion — is
certain. That it had become the proper nomen juris for all such attempts I have
not seen conclusively proved; but it seems highly probable.

We cannot therefore hold, as has sometimes been done, that these witnesses
brought forward special and isolated charge with regard to the temple, and that
on the failure of it the Council passed unfairly to other and disconnected
counts. The special charge was at least in the line of the whole procedure
contemplated. For unless we are to become wholly unhistorical in our legal
criticism, we must believe that the general course of this night’s proceedings
was prearranged by the leading members of the Sanhedrin, and that they, and not
the witnesses, really conducted the prosecution. The evidence is overwhelming (
John 7:25; John 7:30; John 7:45; John 8:40; John 9:22; John 11:47; John 11:57;
Matthew 21:23; Matthew 21:46; Luke 20:20; Matthew 26:3 et seq .) that at
repeated meetings of what the Fourth Gospel even calls a Council, and what may
have been formal meetings of the acting committee of that body, the suppression,
and if need be the death, of Jesus had been previously resolved upon. And in
these preliminary proceedings it was not merely His acts as a prophet or as an
opposer of existing institutions that were deliberated upon. His claim to be the
Christ, and even (as his nearer followers had already acknowledged Him to be)
the Son of God — whatever that mysterious claim might mean — had during the
second part of His career pressed heavily upon the Hebrew conscience, especially
in Jerusalem. The decision alleged in the Fourth Gospel, “That if any man did
confess that he was the Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue,” does not
indeed formally negative that claim. It may only, as Neander holds, have
reserved it for the judgment of the one competent tribunal, the great Council of
the nation; while it forbade all private persons, whatever their individual
views, from in the meantime publicly anticipating the solemn verdict. But it
combines with innumerable other parts of the history to show the agitating
questions which pressed on the minds of the judges as they listened to witness
after witness in that early dawn. The evidence, all agree, was not found
sufficient — perhaps not found “relevant” — so as to infer a conviction upon it
alone. The rule of law in such a case was dear, that the accused must be at once
liberated. It was not done. And even had the inculpatory evidence been found
sufficient, the next step, according to the rules of the court, was to call
witnesses for the defense. Such a proposal would of course have been a mockery
in a trial at such an hour. But even that was not done. What was actually done
was an attempt to cross-examine the accused. “Answerest thou nothing? What is it
which these witness against thee?” are the exact words of the High Priest
repeated in two of the narratives. But He “held his peace, and answered
nothing.” The interrogation, too, was unlawful. But I am not, able to represent
this silence as caused by indignation at the errors of the accusers, or the
unfairness of the judges. That the ordinary rights of every accused Hebrew had
been present to the mind of Jesus we have already seen. But that He had any
expectation of escaping, or even any desire at this stage to do so, there is no
evidence whatever. All the narratives combine to show that He had for some time
been consciously moving on to a tragical and tremendous close of His brief
career. His utterances in anticipation of it during the previous weeks, and
especially on the preceding day, have held the world spellbound in each
succeeding generation. A similar height of self-possession marks Him at this
final hour. The inaccurate or malicious recollections of what He had said three
years or three weeks before were nothing now to Him. He had not come to
Jerusalem to perish by a mistake; and if we are to fill that silence with
thoughts at all, we may suppose that they had reference to the scene that now
surrounded Him. For there, at last, were gathered before Him the children of the
House of Israel, represented in their supreme Council and great assembly. To
this people He had always held Himself sent and commissioned. Now at last they
have met; and all the ages of Israel’s past rise in the mind of Him who stands
to be judged — or to judge. At what hour the great concluding scene, so vividly
described by three of the Evangelists, took place, it is impossible to say.
Plainly enough, the private and public examinations of the witnesses must have
occupied a considerable time, and whether or not these had been attended by “all
the Council,” or a portion of its members, it is quite certain that by this time
at the point where these examinations were discontinued — a large number of the
great Sanhedrin” was met. The members of that body numbered seventy-one; the
“little Sanhedrin,” which was probably a committee or cabinet formed out of the
larger, numbered only twenty-three. It is very possible that the smaller body
may have been summoned at a somewhat earlier hour by Caiaphas, and it may be
that no other ever assembled. Still the narratives rather suggest that the great
Council, which alone could at this time try a man for his life, and which alone
could at any time judge a prophet, was also called. Let us concede to the
language of the Evangelists that so much of the law was properly observed. We
must, in that case, imagine the Council as sitting in the hall Gazith, half
within and half without the holy place. The seats were placed in a circle, and
half of the seventy sat on the right and half on the left of the President or
Nasi , who on this occasion was the High Priest Caiaphas. At his one hand sat
the “Father of the Court,” at the other the “Sage.” Two scribes waited at the
table to record the sentence; two officers guarded the prisoner, who stood in
front of the President. Among the semicircular crowd of judges, Caiaphas and his
friends, highest in rank and in Roman favor, represented also the great
Sadducean element. The Sadducees, as rationalists, had no particular enmity to
Jesus, over and above their general distaste for the introduction of the Divine
as an element in human affairs. But, as the aristocratic and official party,
they were most keenly alive to the disorganization which that element often
produces, and were always disposed to suppress it before it had got to a
dangerous length. The previous appeal of the High Priest to the salus populi as
overriding all individual claims of right — “Ye know nothing at all, nor
consider that it is expedient for us that one man die for the people, and that
the whole nation perish not” — was one full of reason. His plan seems to have
been founded on a just and sound view of the temper of his own nation and of the
Roman authorities, — a clear-sighted and comprehensive view, omitting no element
that ought to be taken into account, except the existence of God and His
nearness to men. But in the working out of that plan a certain exasperation must
by this time have mingled with the calm determination to get rid of a saintly
fellow-citizen. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were an equally large part of
the Council, and their patriotic and religious feelings had originally been far
more appealed to by the preaching of Jesus. But the inward struggle which had
preceded their rejection of His claims had caused that rejection to be followed,
according to the ordinary laws of human nature, by a growing hostility, which by
this time was almost hatred.

It was they, the zealots of the Council, who no doubt took the initiative in the
extraordinary and tumultuous scene which closed the sitting. During the later
examination of witnesses Jesus had been silent; but the thought of His Messianic
or Divine claim pressed upon His judges with overwhelming force, and broke out
at last into passionate utterance. The discrepancy between the Evangelists here
merely reveals to us all the actors in the scene. “Art thou the Christ? tell
us,” they cried; and the irrepressible exclamations of the judicial crowd
described in one Gospel were only put an end to by the solemn adjuration of
their President, recorded in another. To the eager and hostile questions of the
Council, Jesus answered at first in a twofold utterance: “If I tell you, ye will
not believe.” Was He thinking sadly of their forgotten duty to weigh His word,
and of a result to Himself, or to them? But He adds, “And if I also ask you,” as
He had done perhaps only a few days before in the temple, when they had demanded
His authority, “if I, instead, put my questions to you, ye will not answer me,”
and ye will not release your prisoner. It was true; but the Council was long
past being turned from its purpose by the reference which these words again
have, as I think, to judicial fairness and the order of justice. They saw in his
face the light of that more than earthly claim which His lips only for a few
moments delayed to make; and with a mixture of terrible and hateful emotions,
starting to their feet, then said they all, “Art thou then the Son of God?” But
above that crowd of aged and angry faces was now seen rising the High Priest of
Israel, and all voices sunk away as the chief magistrate and judge of the sacred
nation demanded, in the name of God whose office he bore, an answer to his most
solemn adjuration, “I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether
thou be the Christ, the Son of the Blessed!” It was the question for which men
had waited so long; and now the answer came. “I am,” the Christ, the Son of God;
and, turning to the crowd who sat in their places of power around him, he added,
“Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and
coming in. the clouds of heaven.” It was the critical moment for the elect
people. When a king declared himself in Israel, the manner was that he stood in
the temple by a pillar, and the people of the land receiving him rejoiced with
hosanna and song., with palm-branch and with trumpet. And if this was the manner
of a king, how should the King- Messiah be received when He claimed to be the
Son of the Highest? But when a man blasphemed the name of God, the ordinance in
Israel was that everyone who heard it should rend his garment from the top
downwards — rend it into two parts which might again never be sewn into one. And
scarcely had Jesus witnessed His confession before those many witnesses, when
the High Priest, standing in his place, rent his clothes, saying, “He hath
spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? Behold, now ye have
heard his blasphemy. What think ye?” And they answered and said, “He is ISH
MAVETH — a man of death.”. . . “Then they all condemned him to be worthy of
death.” So passed that great condemnation.

There are very few points with regard to it which remain to be noticed.

One relates to the lawfulness of the High Priest’s adjuration, and to the
judicial use of the confession of the accused. Nothing can be clearer than the
Talmudists on this. “Our law,” says Maimonides, “condemns no one to death upon
his own confession.” “It is a fundamental principle with us,” says Bartenora,
“that no one can clamage himself by what he says in judgment.” Putting the
question to the accused, and founding a condemnation on his answer, was
therefore the last violation of formal justice. But what as to its substance?
The question had been put, and the answer had been given. Assuming that the
claim thus made by Jesus had come in some lawful form before the Sanhedrin, were
they shut up to this condemnation? In answering this we have first to remember
the distinctions already taken between blasphemy, in its simple meaning of
profanity or insult to God, and blasphemy as equivalent to treason, overt or
constructive, against the theocracy. In the former sense there was no case here.
The words of the great accused were full of filial reverence for the Father. We
have therefore to go on to the latter sense, and to face the grave question, Was
it high treason in a Jew to claim to be the Messias, the Son of God? Most
certainly it was — unless it was true . And if blasphemy was the proper word by
which to designate so tremendously audacious a claim, then was such a false
claim also blasphemous. But what if it were true? In such a case the falsehood
was of the essence of the crime, and had to be proved or assumed before the
judicial conclusion could be reached. The mere claim to be the Messiah was no
crime. “Art thou the Christ?” was asked continually, of John, of Jesus, of every
reformer, and of every prophet; though an answer in the affirmative was held to
be the most daring claim that human lips could frame. What relation indeed the
Messiah of the Jews was supposed to have to their unseen King, and how far the
dignity, not unknown to that age, of “Son of God,” could freely be applied to
the expected Christ, are questions on which vast learning has been expended. We
shall equally err if we suppose that these words had in their ears all the
meaning with which subsequent theology has invested them, or if we forget that
the purpose and bearing of the accused gave them, on this last as on previous
occasions, a unique and Divine significance. But the two-fold claim of the
Messiahship and the Sonship — made seemingly in response to the grouping of the
two ideas (Art thou “the Christ, the Son of God?”) by the High Priest himself —
could never release a Hebrew tribunal from the duty of weighing a claim to
Messiahship. The proper response of an unbelieving judge, like Caiaphas, when
his adjuration was answered by confession, was, “What sign shewest thou then,
that we may see and believe thee?” And when, instead, he rent his clothes, with
the words, “What need ye further witnesses?” it was either the preconcerted plan
by which to terminate the whole semblance of judicial procedure, or, perhaps, a
sudden inspiration of evil, spoken a second time not wholly of himself, in a
moment when the cold, hard, cruel thoughts, which had so long smoldered in the
unjust judge, blazed up at the touch of confronting Righteousness into final and
murderous paroxysm.

We pass next to the Roman tribunal. But our conclusion on the question of Hebrew
law must be this: that a process begun, continued, and apparently finished, in
the course of one night; commencing with witnesses against the accused who were
sought for by the judges, but whose evidence was not sustained even by them;
continued by interrogatories which Hebrew law does not sanction, and ending with
a demand for confession which its doctors expressly forbid; all followed,
twenty-four hours too soon, by a sentence which described a claim to be the
Fulfiller of the hopes of Israel as blasphemy, — that such a process had neither
the form nor the fairness of a judicial trial. But though it wanted judicial
fairness and form, it may nevertheless have been a real and important
transaction. There is no reason to think that the Council missed the fact that
Jesus claimed to be their King, though they deeply misunderstood the nature of
His Kingdom. And there is every reason to believe that their condemnation truly
expressed the rejection of His claim by the nation itself. THE ROMAN TRIAL
Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio
affectus est. — Tacitus. THE FOUR NARRATIVES MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN Now when
morning was come, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took
counsel against Jesus to put him to death: and they bound him, and led him away,
and delivered him up to Pilate the governor. . .

Now Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him, saying, Art
thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, And straightway in the
morning the chief priests with the elders and scribes, and the whole council,
held a consultation, and bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him up
to Pilate. And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering
saith unto him, Thou sayest. And the chief priests accused him of many things.
And Pilate again And the whole company of them rose up and brought him before
Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this man perverting our
nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is
Christ a King. And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And
he answered him and said, Thou sayest. And They lead Jesus therefore from
Caiaphas into the palace, and it was early; and they themselves entered not into
the palace, that they might not be defiled, but might eat the passover. Pilate
therefore went out unto them, and saith, What accusation bring ye against this
man? They answered and said unto him, If this man were not an evil-doer, we
should not have delivered Thou sayest. And when he was accused of the chief
priests and elders, he answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou
not how many things they witness against thee? And he gave him no answer, not
even to one word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly.

Now at the feast the governor was wont to release unto the multitude one
prisoner, whom they would. And they had then a notable prisoner, called
Barabbas. When therefore they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them,
Whom will ye that I release unto you? asked him, saying, Answerest thou nothing?
behold how many things they accuse thee of. But Jesus no more answered anything;
insomuch that Pilate marveled.

Now at the feast he used to release unto them one prisoner, whom they asked of
him. And there was one called Barabbas, lying bound with them that had made
insurrection, men who in the insurrection had committed murder. And the
multitude went up and began to ask him to do as he was wont to do unto them. And
Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release Pilate said unto the chief
priests and the multitudes, I find no fault in this man. But they were the more
urgent, saying, He stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Judaea, and
beginning from Galilee even unto this place. But when Pilate heard it, he asked
whether the man were a Galilean. And when he knew that he was of Herod’s
jurisdiction, he sent him unto Herod, who himself also was at Jerusalem in these
days. Now when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was of a long time
desirous to see him, because he him up unto thee. Pilate therefore said unto
them, Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law. The Jews said
unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death: that the word of
Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what manner of death he
should die.

Pilate therefore entered again into the palace, and called Jesus, and said unto
him, Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered, Sayest thou this of thyself,
or did others tell it thee concerning me?

Pilate answered, Am I a Jew?

Thine own nation and the Barabbas, or Jesus, which is called Christ? For he knew
that for envy they had delivered him up. And while he was sitting on the
judgment-seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that
righteous man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of
him.

Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the multitude that they should
ask for Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. But the governor answered and said unto
them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? And they said, unto
you the King of the Jews? For he perceived that for envy the chief priests had
delivered him up. But the chief priests stirred up the multitude, that he should
rather release Barabbas unto them. And Pilate again answered and said unto them,
What then shall I do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried
out again, Crucify him. And Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done?
But they cried out exceedingly, Crucify him. And Pilate, wishing to content the
multitude, released unto them Barabbas, had heard concerning him; and he hoped
to see some miracle done by him. And he questioned him in many words; but he
answered him nothing. And the chief priests and the scribes stood, vehemently
accusing him. And Herod with his soldiers set him at naught, and mocked him, and
arraying him in gorgeous apparel, sent him back to Pilate. And Herod and Pilate
became friends with each other that very day; for before they were at enmity
between themselves. And Pilate called together the chief priests and the rulers
and the people and chief priests delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this
world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews:
but now is my kingdom not from hence.

Pilate therefore said unto him Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest
that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into
the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.

Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him,
Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What then shall I do unto Jesus which is
called Christ? They all say, Let him be crucified. And he said, Why, what evil
hath he done? But they cried out exceedingly, saying, Let him be crucified. So
when Pilate saw that he prevailed nothing, but rather that a tumult was arising,
he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent
of the blood of this righteous man: see ye to it . And all the people answered
and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Then released he unto them and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be
crucified. said unto them, Ye brought unto me this man, as one that perverteth
the people: and behold, I, having examined him before you, found no fault in
this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him: no, nor yet Herod: for he
sent him back unto us; and behold, nothing worthy of death hath been done by
him. I will therefore chastise him, and release him. But they cried out all
together, saying, Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas: one who for
a certain insurrection made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison.
And What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews,
and saith unto them, I find no crime in him. But ye have a custom, that I should
release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you
the King of the Jews? They cried out therefore again, saying, Not this man, but
Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber. Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and
scourged him. And the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his
head, and arrayed him in a purple garment; and they came unto him, and Barabbas:
but Jesus he scourged and delivered to be crucified.

Pilate spake unto them again, desiring to release Jesus. But they shouted,
saying, Crucify, crucify him. And he said unto them the third time, Why, what
evil hath this man done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will therefore
chastise him and release him. But they were instant with loud voices, asking
that he might be crucified. And their voices prevailed. And Pilate gave sentence
that what they asked for should be done. said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they
struck him with their hands. And Pilate went out again, and saith unto them,
Behold, I bring him out to you, that ye may know that I find no crime in him.

Jesus therefore came out, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple garment.
And Pilate saith unto them, Behold, the man! When therefore the chief priests
and the officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him.

Pilate saith unto them, Take him yourselves, and crucify him: for I find no
crime in him. The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by that law he ought to
die, because he made himself the Son of God. When Pilate therefore heard this
saying, he was the more afraid; and he entered into the palace again, and saith
unto Jesus, Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer. Pilate therefore
saith unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to
release thee, and have power to crucify thee? Jesus answered him, Thou wouldest
have no power against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he
that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin.

Upon this Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews cried out, saying, If thou
release this man, thou art not Caesar’s friend: every one that maketh himself a
king speaketh against Caesar. When Pilate therefore heard these words, he
brought Jesus out, and sat down on the judgment-seat at a place called The
Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the preparation of the passover:
it was about the sixth hour. And he saith unto the Jews, Behold, your King! They
therefore cried out, Away with him , away with him , crucify him.

Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered,
We have no king but Caesar. Then therefore he delivered him unto them to be
crucified.


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  CHAPTER 4: 02 ROMAN TRIAL
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THE trial of their Messiah by the Sanhedrin, had it stood alone, would have no
doubt been the most interesting judicial transaction in history. The law of
Moses, perpetuated though modified by Christianity, has perhaps been more
influential than any other code of the world. Yet that law has had one rival —
in the mighty jurisprudence of Rome. “The written reason of the Roman law has
been silently or studiously transfused” into all our modern life, and lawyers of
every nation look back with filial reverence to the great jurisconsults of the
great age of the Imperial Republic. But between the two influences there is one
important point of contrast. In the Hebrew commonwealth law was the product of
religion. It was received, as Christendom has been content to receive it, as a
Divine rule. There is no evidence whatever that the Jewish race was remarkable
for an innate passion for justice, or for any such “tendency to righteousness”
as might have originally led it to religion. Their whole history and literature
indicate, on the contrary, that it was the intense sense of the Divine which
molded the nation originally, and which afterwards led to a widespread though
imperfect cultivation of the ars boni et aequi . Even that Rabbinic cultivation,
as we have seen, was marred by continual exaggerations and artifices which
reveal the original inaptitude of the race for the highest judicial excellence.
Accordingly, down to the time with which we are dealing, it remained a small,
isolated Asiatic tribe, filled through and through with national and religious
prejudices. It is not to such a source that men look for a model of the
administration of equal laws. But there have been races in the world who
reflected, as there are races who do reflect, in an eminent degree, that deep
sense of righteousness which lies at the root of all law. And of all such races,
ancient and modern, the greatest was that which at this time ruled over
Palestine and over the world. When the scepter departed from Judah, it passed
into the strong, smiting hands of Rome; and already all the nations had begun to
exchange their terror of Rome’s warlike might for that admiration of its
administrative wisdom which has grown upon the world ever since. And already,
too, that admiration was mingled with confidence and trust. Those Eastern races
felt, what we two thousand years after can historically trace, that the better
part of the unequaled authority of Roman law was due to the stern, hard virtues
of the early race and early Republic. It was dimly recognized then, and it is
clearly traceable now, that that influence and authority sprang from an instinct
of righteousness enforced by praetor and proconsul in every subject land, long
before Ulpian or Gaius had written it out into immortal law.

Pontius Pilate was at this time the representative of Rome in Judaea — the
governor, as he is called in the Gospels. But it will be found instructive to
note more carefully what his exact position was. He was the Procuator Caearis ;
the procurator, deputy, or attorney of Tiberius in that province. And he was no
procurator fiscalis , with functions equivalent to those of Quaestor. Pilate’s
was no such subordinate or financial office, he was a procurator cum potestate ;
a governor with civil, criminal, and military jurisdiction; subordinated no
doubt in rank to the adjacent Governor of Syria, but directly responsible to his
great master at Rome. And what was the relation of the Emperor himself to the
inhabitants of Judaea and to the world? The answer is important. The Emperor was
neither more nor less than the representative of Rome. In modern times men
associate the imperial title with absolutism, and a more than royal power. To
Romans, even in the days of Tiberius, the name of a king was intolerable, and
absolutism, except under republican forms, distasteful. Accordingly, when
Augustus became the undisputed chief of the Republic, and determined so to
continue, he remained nominally a mere private nobleman or citizen. The savior
of society did not dare to attack the constitution of the State.

He effected his object in another way. He gathered into his own hands the whole
powers and functions, and accumulated upon his own head the whole honors and
privileges, which the State had for centuries distributed among its great
magistrates and representatives. He became perpetual Princeps Senatus, or leader
of the legislative house. He became perpetual Pontifex Maximus, or chief of the
national religion. He became perpetual Tribune, or guardian of the people, with
his person thereby made sacred and inviolable. He became perpetual Consul, or
supreme magistrate over the whole Roman world, with the control of its revenues,
the disposal of its armies, and the execution of its laws. And lastly, he became
perpetual Imperator, or military chief, to whom every legionary throughout the
world took the sacramentum , and whose sword swept the globe from Gibraltar to
the Indus and the Baltic. And yet in all he was a simple citizen — a mere
magistrate of the Republic. Only, in this one man was now visibly accumulated
and concentrated all that for centuries had broadened and expanded under the
magnificent abstraction of Rome. Tiberius, therefore, the first inheritor of
this constitution of Caesar Augustus, was in the strictest sense the
representative of that great city that ruled over the kings of the earth. And
the Roman knight who now governed in Judaea was his representative in his public
capacity. For Augustus, as is well known, had divided the provinces into two
classes. To the more peaceful and central he allowed the Senate to send
proconsuls, while even over these he reserved his own consular and military
power. But some provinces, like Judaea, he retained in his own hands as their
proconsul or governor. Strictly and constitutionally, the governor of the Jewish
nation, at the time of which we write, was not Pilate at Caesarea or Vitellius
at Antioch, but Tiberius at Rome. He was the Proconsul or Governor of Judaea
under the still-existing Republic — a Republic now almost identified with
himself. And Pilate, whom the Jews popularly called their governor, was strictly
the procurator of the great Proconsul, holding civil and military authority by
delegation from him in whom was now embodied the boundless authority of Rome.
Such was the tribunal before which the Council of the Sanhedrin is now to lead a
prisoner.

Pilate sat in his Praetorium on the morning of that “preparation-day,” to
transact business and administer justice as usual. In what spot in Jerusalem his
judgment-seat was on this occasion set up, cannot certainly be known.

It may have been within the fortress and under the tower of Antonia, the visible
symbol of Roman predominance which frowned beside the temple.

Much more probably it was “Herod’s Praetorium,” that magnificent palace to the
north of the temple which Josephus describes, and which had been recently built
by the Idumean kings. Their former palace was also still in existence, and the
visit of the Roman procurator and the Tetrarch of Galilee to the same feast,
while it raises the question which of them occupied the new and more splendid
residence, suggests the inevitable rivalry and possible “enmity” of their
relation. If we suppose that Pilate, like Florus, asserted his right to occupy
the new palace, we may remember that its white marble semicircle enclosed an
open Place which had looked out on the sacred city, and was almost as public as
the space between Antonia and the temple. In the open space in front of this or
any other Praetorium the movable Bema or tribunal could at once be set up. But
on this morning Pilate was still sitting within the judgment-hall. Outside was
the roar of the Eastern city awakening on a Passover dawn; within, the clash of
Roman steel, the altars of the Roman gods, and perhaps the sculptured frown of
the distant demigod Tiberius. Into that heathen chamber the priests and doctors
of the separated nation would not enter during their sacred week; and the Roman,
with his Roman smile, graciously removed their difficulty by coming with his
soldier-lictors to the gate. But his first words there, as his eyes fell upon
the prisoner who stood with his hands bound before him, were: “What accusation
bring ye against this man?” We recognize instantly the spontaneous voice of
Roman justice. It was no doubt meant to suggest his own authority and power of
review, and in that respect we must presently consider it. But it was before
everything else the instinctive utterance of a judge, and it at once recalls
that memorable dictum of Pilate’s successor in the same seat: “It is not the
manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, until that he which is accused
have the accusers face to face, and have license to answer for himself
concerning the crime laid against him.” So ever spoke the worst of the Roman
governors — and neither Pilate nor Festus was among the best — out of the mere
instinct and tradition of justice which clung to their great office among the
treacherous tribes around. The chief priests and scribes on this occasion
avoided the demand to know the accusation. “If he were not a malefactor, we
would not have delivered him to thee.” The insolent evasion of his question was
not likely to propitiate Pilate, who instantly puts the matter on its true
footing by the calm but somewhat contemptuous reply, “Take ye him, and judge him
according to your law.”

Sullenly came the answer, “It is not lawful for us (it is not permissible — oujk
e]xestin ) to put any man to death.” The answer revealed (what the word
“malefactor” had perhaps already implied, and what may have been involved in
their bringing their prisoner to Pilate at all) that it was a capital charge
which they had come to make. But it closed this important opening dialogue. The
conversation just narrated is only found in the Gospel of John; and it is
remarkable that a narrative supposed to be much later than the others should
record words which not only have the strongest internal evidence of truth, but
to which subsequent investigation has given immensely increased historical
value. For at this point of the story comes in the question of conflict of
jurisdiction . Why did the Jews go to Pilate at all? We have seen that their
Council condemned Jesus to be “guilty of death.” Had they no right to pass such
a sentence? or, having the right to pass it, had they merely no power to execute
it? How far did the authority of the governor trench upon, or supersede, the
authority of the Sanhedrin? Which of them had the jus vitae aut necis ? What was
the relation of the two powers, the Jewish and the Roman, to each other at this
time? This broad historical question lies at the root of the views which may be
taken of the legal point — views which have sometimes been extremely contrasted.
In the controversy between Salvador and Dupin, the former (true in this to the
sad claim of some of his nation of old, “His blood be on us “) urged that the
Sanhedrin had full authority to try even for capital crimes, and that their
sentence of death required only the countersign or endorsement of the Roman
governor. His opponent held that the Jewish court had no right to try for grave,
or at least capital, crimes at all; that their whole procedure was a usurpation;
and that the only real or competent trial was that which we are about to
consider. I have no intention of going into the great mass of historical
investigation which has been accumulated on this confessedly difficult point.
There seems no one consideration which is quite conclusive upon it. Thus it
would be rash to ascribe to the assertion of the Talmud, that “forty years
before the destruction of the temple the judgment of capital causes was taken
away from Israel,” the praise of exact chronological accuracy. Yet it. is very
striking as showing the time about which the doctors of the Jewish law were
willing to hold that their power of life and death (no (doubt already restricted
or suspended under the despotism of Herod) had finally passed away. But on the
general subject of the relation of the two powers in that age there are some
considerations which reasoners on either side do not seem to have always kept in
view, but which are important. 1. There was no concordat on this subject between
the Romans and the Jews. The latter were the conquered nation; their
jurisdiction, including the power of life and death, was wrested from them de
facto , and they were obliged to submit. But de jure they never did. To them, at
least to the great mass of the nation, the Sanhedrin was still the national
authority, especially in accusations relating to religious matters. 2. On the
Roman side, the matter was of course precisely the reverse. Their view of the
jurisdiction of subject races generally, and of the Jews in particular, was, I
suspect, that it was just so much as they chose to leave them. In most cases
that formed a very large field. The Roman governor sanctioned, or even himself
administered, the old law of the region; but the policy of the ruling power was
to concede to local self-government as much as possible. The concession was of
course all the larger where there was no disposition on the part of the province
to provoke a contest. In Roman law as in Roman campaigns, in questions of
jurisdiction as in questions of politics, the maxim of the haughty and wise
rulers of the world was parcere subjectis et debellare superbos . 3. It is
evident that a large latitude was allowed on this subject to the great Roman
officers — proconsuls or procurators — who administered la haute justice . The
Republic and the Emperor permitted, and indeed demanded, that they should
stretch or relax their authority as the particular case or exigency required. In
ordinary matters brought before their tribunals, the rule on which they acted is
perfectly expressed, a few years after this, by Annaeus Gallio, the humane
proconsul of Achaia, and brother of the philosopher Seneca: “If it were a matter
of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with
you: but if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it;
I will be no judge of such matters.” But while they drove such questions from
the judgmentseat, so long as they did not affect the rights of the sovereign
power, the least hint that one of these words or names or questions of another
law could prejudice the supreme power of Rome was enough to authorize the
governor to plunge his ax into the offending part of the body politic with
prompt and savage severity.

These general considerations should never be forgotten in reading the scattered
and often inconsistent historical notices on the subject. They show that the
extreme views, which critics in our own time have maintained, were probably held
even then by the opposing powers whose jurisdictions were in poise. But the
balance of evidence is very strong that, at this time, all questions of life and
death in Judaea were by Roman law and practice reserved for the final decision
of the Roman governor. In such cases the Jews had, at the most, only the
cognitio causae they could try the cause, but not sentence the accused. Nor can
there be much doubt that the governor’s final power in these cases was not a
merely ministerial right of endorsement and executio ; it was also a power of re
-cognitio , or review, in so far at least as he chose to exercise it. Whether
this reservation to the governor was such as to deprive the Jewish courts of
their rights as tribunals of first instance — whether any previous trial of a
capital cause before the Sanhedrin was necessarily a usurpation — is another and
a more difficult question. With regard to ordinary civil crimes — robberies or
assassinations — the Jewish rulers may have been content not to interfere
further than to bring the perpetrators to the Roman tribunal for judgment. The
Roman judges, on the other hand, may have been quite willing to send to the
cross without much inquiry any ordinary malefactors against whom the authorities
of the country, having already inquired into the case, were willing to appear as
accusers. But, obviously, a more serious question arose when the alleged crime
was a religious one — a claim, as prophet or Messiah, to change the
ecclesiastical institutions. In such a ease the Sanhedrin itself no doubt
maintained, as the Jews generally did on its behalf, an exclusive right to judge
in the first instance; and its tendency would be very strong to deny any
re-cognitio by the Roman power, and either not to call in that power at all, or
to limit it to a mere right of countersign. What view the Roman governor might
take, in the very unusual ease of such a charge being brought to his tribunal,
was another matter. But in truth, while the dialogue-narrative of the Fourth
Gospel admirably illustrates the historical relations of the parties at the
time, the history as it actually occurred supersedes the necessity for referring
to these more general relations. Whether it was legitimate or not for the Jews
to condemn for a capital crime, on this occasion they did so. Whether it was
legitimate or not for Pilate to try over again an accused whom they had
condemned, on this occasion he did so. There were certainly two trials. And the
dialogue already narrated expresses with the most admirable terseness the
struggle which we should have expected between the effort of the Jews to get a
mere countersign of their sentence, and the determination of Pilate to assume
his full judicial responsibility, whether of first instance or of revision . The
reluctance of the Jews on the present occasion was no doubt prompted, not so
much by their usual ecclesiastical independence as by their dread lest inquiry
by Pilate should prevent his carrying out their scheme. But as matters actually
turned out, the collision which the Procurator’s first words provoked had the
effect of binding him publicly, before the men of both nations who surrounded
his judgment-seat, to deal with this capital case in his judicial capacity. It
was henceforth no mere matter of administration, no incident of summary police
jurisdiction or military court-martial. It was a deliberate judgment of life and
death by the supreme civil ruler, who had interposed his jurisdiction between an
accused man and the chief authorities of the subject nation. The Accusation
demanded by Pilate necessarily followed, now that he had insisted on being judge
in the cause. We have this given with considerable formality in the Gospel of
Luke; and though it is omitted in the three others, the first question of Pilate
to Jesus, which they all record, implies a previous charge. Luke gives it thus:
“We found this man perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to
Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.” Had the accusation retained
the form in which it was brought before the Sanhedrin — had it been a merely
religious or ecclesiastical crime which was now named — a different question
would have arisen. Had the chief priests, when they “began to accuse” Jesus,
said at once what they passionately exclaimed at a later stage of the cause, “We
have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of
God,” it may be doubtful what Pilate would have done. He was authorized as
governor to administer their law, or to preside over and control its
administration; and while his leaning would be, like that of Gallio, to consider
this question a matter of words, he might have been induced to see that these
words covered grave consequences to the State. But such difficulties were
avoided by the deliberate change made by the accusers in the form of the
accusation — or perhaps, by their reverting to that accusation which had been
originally intended, and for which the ecclesiastical procedure of the night
before was a pretext or preliminary. If we accept this sentence of Luke as
equivalent to the nominis delatio of the Roman law, or to the affidavit of the
prosecutor-witness of the Hebrew law already considered — and it has
resemblances to both — it throws a flood of light before as well as behind. The
charge of “perverting” (diastre>fonta ), including perhaps “revolutionizing” as
well as “seducing” the nation, was fairly true, and was distinctly included in
the Jewish procedure of the night before. No doubt to Roman ears it was
‘ambiguous, but the ambiguity recalls that very real doubt which had governed
his mind who said, “If we let him alone, all men will believe on him, and the
Romans will come and take away our place and our nation.” The culminating
charge, that Jesus called Himself “Christ a King,” was also true, and had just
been acknowledged to be true, though scarcely in the sense in which the accusers
desired that the ears of the governor should receive it. But if we are to take
Luke’s narrative, we must believe that the charge was not left in this ambiguous
and ineffective form. The managers of the impeachment had no doubt not intended
to make a deliberately untrue statement before the heathen judgment-seat. They
wished, at as small an expense of falsehood as possible, to throw upon the
foreign power the odium of a prophet’s death. But the prompt utterances of
Pilate seem to have forced them into the villainy they would rather have
avoided, and between the more ambiguous charges of seducing the nation and
claiming a royal Messiahship they add, by way of illustration, “forbidding to
give tribute to Caesar.” It was a sheer falsehood, and some of the accusers must
have known it to be the converse of the fact as recently ascertained. But it was
a suggestion which, as they must also have known, would give the most deadly
significance to the other vaguer and truer heads of the indictment, and would
make it impossible for the governor to waive the capital charge. For there is no
mistake as to what the crime here imputed is. It is majestas — the greatest
crime known in Roman law, the greatest crime conceivable by the Roman
imagination — an attack upon the sovereignty or supreme majesty of the Roman
State. In the early days of the Republic the name perduellio was applied to
treason and rebellion, and the citizen condemned by the people for that crime
was interdicted from fire and water, or hanged upon an arbor infelix . As the
rule of the city spread over the world, treason came to be known as an attack
upon its majesty; and various laws were passed to define this crime and the
treatment of it, the chief enactment being the Lex Julia . According to this
law, every accusation of treason against a Roman citizen must be made by a
written libel. A Jewish provincial had of course no such protection. He stood
before the Procurator of the Caesar, with no defense against the summary
exercise of absolute power but the plea of justice.

We come now to the Defense . All the narratives bear that Pilate put the same
question to Jesus, in the same words, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” but that,
on His answering in the affirmative, the Roman came to the paradoxical
conclusion that there was “no fault in him.” The Fourth Gospel contains the
explanatory conversation which these facts almost necessarily imply. The
statement of Jesus is unusually impressive. It is couched, no doubt, in that
involved, allusive, and aphoristic style of utterance which we find in this
Gospel from end to end. But we must remember that all the biographies represent
this very style as occasionally used by Jesus, and as characteristic of Him in
critical circumstances. It comes out in all the histories when He touches on the
esoteric “mysteries of the kingdom” He preached, or where His own claims are
brought in question; and it manifestly grew more and more His manner of
utterance towards the close of His career. We hold, therefore, that a statement
which, though only recorded in the latest Gospel, must according to all the
others have been substantially made, and which as reported is at once
startlingly original and intensely characteristic, has every internal evidence
of being historical. This dialogue took place in the Praetorium, where Jesus may
have possibly been detained while the question of jurisdiction was settled with
His accusers. (It rather appears, however, that He must have been present while
the accusation was made; the two first Evangelists state that either then or at
a later stage His silence extorted the marvel of the governor, who said,
“hearest thou not how many things they witness against, thee?”) He now, however,
brings his prisoner within, and puts the sudden question, “Art thou the King of
the Jews?” Jesus’ answer, “Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it
thee of me?” does not seem to have been a request to know what had been uttered
by the Jews in His absence. The words evidently have a deeper reference. They
are equivalent to, In what sense dost thou use the expression? “If thou sayest
it of thyself, in the sense in which a Roman would naturally use the word, then
I am not the King of the Jews. But if others told thee this of me, if thou art
using the words of Hebrew prophecy, or of the world’s hope,” that may need
further explanation. Pilate strives to reply as a Roman should, “Am I a Jew?
Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee to me: what hast thou
done?” It was throwing back, and not unfairly, the burden of explanation upon
the accused. So He who had kept silence before the midnight Sanhedrin, and who
made no answer even now to their dissimulated accusation, at once frankly
answered the heathen magistrate, who desired himself to know the truth of the
case: “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then
would my servants fight:. . .but now is my kingdom not from hence.” In
considering words so memorable we must avoid as much as possible the theological
and ecclesiastical, and look only from the historical, and in particular the
forensic and judicial, point of view. Whatever else these words import, they are
in substance, and almost in form, a defense. If they imply a confession of
kingship, they express an avoidance of the particular kind of kingship charged.
They do not set up a plea in bar of the jurisdiction. They seem to acknowledge
that a kingdom of this world would be a legitimate object of attack by the
deputy of Caesar, but they deny that the kingship of Jesus could be so
described. The most important commentary on the words is of course the recent
and famous scene of the tribute money, where Jesus, being demanded as a Jewish
patriot and prophet., “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or no?” answered,
“Show me a penny,” and, having asked the significant question as to Caesar’s
image and superscription engraved upon it, closed the discussion with the words,
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the
things that are God’s.” The two incidents, in common with the whole of the
history, make it certain that it was no part of His plan of kingdom, as it was
no part of the plan of Christianity historically, to attack the Roman power. But
this critical utterance to Pilate (like that former one) seems to go farther. On
the face of it, it indicates that there was no necessary collision between the
kingdom which Jesus was prepared to assert as His own, and that great “kingdom
of this world” which His judge represented. All actual collision there too
probably might be. But the words are meaningless unless they are taken as
asserting separate spheres within which it was possible for each power to
confine itself, and by confining themselves within which it was possible for
them to escape collision. Only one of these kingdoms is described, and it is
defined generally as “of this world,” the definition being illustrated by the
suggestion that in every such kingdom the monarch may suitably be defended by
the armed force of his subjects. The other is as yet only defined by the
negation of these characteristics.

Pilate, as the result indicates, was already impressed by the statement, and
perhaps convinced by it of the innocence of the accused of all conspiracy
against Rome. And yet Jesus still spoke of a kingdom — a kingdom too in this
world, though not of it — and His words of renunciation were more royal than all
the Roman had ever listened to of greatness. With true judicial tact, the
governor lays his finger on the exact point which required to be brought from
negative implication into express statement. “Art thou a king then?” he asked
the prisoner whose kingdom was not of this world. And as before, to the
adjuration of God’s High Priest, so now, to the representative of all the
greatness of earth, the answer came back, making a crisis in the world’s
history, “Thou sayest it: I am a king.” He who spoke so to a Roman governor knew
that He was offering Himself to the cross, and that the next few hours might
close that fateful life. And the thought was in His mind when he deliberately
added, “To this end was I born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I
might bear witness unto the truth.” Whatever else is included in words so great,
this “witness to the truth” certainly embraces the testimony which a moment
before had been given by the speaker Himself — by Him “who before Pontius Pilate
witnessed the good confession” to the existence of a kingdom, true and real,
though not of this kosmos . But this supreme utterance struck a deeper note than
even the assertion of a spiritual and separate kingdom. It proclaimed that which
is the basis of all human veracity and virtue, but which in those later ages was
becoming strange to Roman ears — the existence of an eternal world of truth
outside of man — a universal Divine system of things, high above all local or
national tradition, and indeed above all human beliefs and desires. Over that
objective truth men have no power: their highest privilege is to recognize and
to confess it. And those do recognize it who have already a certain kinship and
relation to that central truth — who are “of the truth.” For the last words to
his judge of Him who now claimed to be both the witness and the King of that
greater world were, “He that is of the truth heareth my voice.” “Pilate
answered, What is truth?” The blank response, half-sarcastic, halfdespairing,
wholly skeptical, will claim notice at a later stage. In the meantime we follow
the course of the judge, who, thus waiving the personal question presented to
him, goes on to deal with the accusation and the accused. The narratives all
bear that Pilate reached and expressed the conclusion that the crime charged had
not been proved — that indeed he found in the accused “no crime at all.” And the
last Gospel distinctly refers the first public utterance of this conviction to
the exact point in the conversation and defense at which we have just arrived.
It was the only defiance which the accused is at any time stated to have
offered; and Pilate now went straight out from the Praetorium, and announced his
verdict, perhaps from the judgment-seat. Yet was this utterance, as it turned
out, only the first step in that downward course of weakness the world knows so
well: a course which, beginning with indecision and complaisance, passed through
all the phases of alternate bluster and subserviency; persuasion, evasion,
protest, and compromise; superstitious dread, conscientious reluctance, cautious
duplicity, and sheer moral cowardice at last; until this Roman remains
photographed for ever as the perfect feature of the unjust judge, deciding
“against his better knowledge, not deceived.”

Upon some of the points in the Evangelic narrative we need not dwell. The
graphic incident of the judge catching at an allusion to Galilee, and, on
ascertaining that the man was a Galilean, sending him to Herod, may be just
noticed in passing. The word used is ajne>pemyen (remisit ), which seems the
exact technical term for restoring an accused to his proper jurisdiction, as
here in sending Him from a forum apprehensionis to a forum originis . Herod’s
declinature was prudent as well as courteous, when we remember the terms of the
accusation. A man, even a provincial, accused of majestas , “stood at Caesar’s
judgment-seat, where he ought to be judged”; and the Idumean “fox” may have
dreaded the lion’s paw, while very willing to exchange courtesies with the
lion’s deputy. The second appearance at the tribunal of the governor shows a
distinct accession of weakness on the part of the judge, and of pressure upon
him by the accusers. His wife’s morning message troubles his conscience, but
does not purify his heart. Pilate is now willing to “chastise him and let him
go,” i .e . to mangle an innocent man with the savage Roman scourge. The Jewish
accusers refuse the compromise; and Pilate, characteristically, seems to have
left them under the impression that he had finally sent Him to the cross, while
he still intended to make a postponed appeal to their compassion. But before
taking his first step in actual guilt, the judge washes his hands with the
memorably vain words, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person’ see ye to
it.” After the scourging, the three Evangelists record nothing but the insults
of the fierce soldiery to one who was given up to them as a Jewish traitor to
their Emperor. But the later Evangelist interposes a series of incidents which
are, now as before, noted with the finest characterization and the most delicate
verisimilitude. He alone records the “Behold the man!” with which the struggling
Procurator, whose “faith unfaithful” still made him “falsely true,” sought to
move the multitude. He alone records the response, “We have a law, and by that
law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God” — an utterance in
exact accordance with that narrative of the Hebrew trial which is given by all
the Synoptics, but which John has omitted. It is he who notices the unexpected
but most natural effect of this claim upon the governor, whom the former
utterances of the King “come into the world” had deeply impressed. “Whence art
thou?” he almost tremulously demands. But from the first moment of his
vacillation Jesus had given him no answer. Pilate, accordingly, at the very time
when he is described as inwardly “more afraid,” flashes out in that insolent
tone which less discriminating secular historians regard as the only one
characteristic of him, “Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have
power to release thee, and power to crucify thee?” Jesus breaks the silence by a
final word of answer, which is of high importance for our subject’ “Thou
wouldest have no power against me, except it were given thee from above:
therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin.” Some writers who
hold that Pilate alone had “jurisdiction” in this case, and that the proceedings
of the Sanhedrin were a usurpation, have appealed to this text, as containing in
its first clause an acknowledgment of the exclusive right of the Roman tribunal,
and in its last a denunciation of the illegality, as well as treachery, of
Caiaphas. This is unwarranted, and in the circumstances grotesque. Yet, while we
notice here first of all the extreme consideration and almost tenderness with
which the sufferer judges His judge, we must confess that the words, “Thy power
(ejxousi>a ) is given thee from above,” do relate themselves to the previous
acknowledgment of a “kingdom of this world,” a kosmos in which men are to give
to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; while they add to that former
acknowledgment the explicit idea (afterwards enforced by the apostles) that this
earthly kingdom with its earthly aims is also from above. The powers that be are
ordained of God; Pilate, who knew this not, was abusing a great and legitimate
office partly through a heathen’s ignorance; and in so far he was less guilty
than the false accusers who sat, in Moses’ seat. It was not strange that words
so noble should have prompted one last effort on the judge’s part to save
himself from his weakness. But it was too late. The Jewish hierarchs had now
taken the full measure of the man, and their final argument was one fitted to
bear down in him all of conscience that remained. “If thou let this man go, thou
art not Caesar’s friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against
Caesar.”

Few utterances are more valuable historically than this last general statement.
To feel the full force of it we must recall how, as already explained, the
Caesar had gathered up in himself all the public offices of the Republic, so
that treason against the State and treason against him had become almost the
same. The old Roman watchfulness to crush out attempts against Rome was now
intensified by being absorbed into the jealous personal suspicion of a despot.
It was no anti-climax when the shrewd Jewish politicians, instead of saying,
“Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against the majesty of the State,”
preferred to say, “Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.”
Long before this period of the reign of Tiberius the latter had become the
deadlier form of the crime. Some of the accusers must have remembered the early
days of the dynasty, when Julius and Octavius perpetrated their own successful
lese-majeste , and the nation of the Jews, adhering to them in the great
convulsion, merited the name which came afterwards to be known as the title of
honor, of “Caesar’s friends.” For some time thereafter, indeed, Palestine was on
the footing of a “client-state” under Caesar; since 6 A.D. it had been
absolutely Caesar’s province. And the leading Jews must have been aware that
while the first Emperor had extended the law of treason to punish libels against
his own person, Tiberius, still more watchful in his jealousy, used the leges
majestatis continually against all who failed in respect to the majesty of
Caesar, even if they did not speak against him (ajntile>gein ) in the sense of
favoring counter claims by themselves or others. The great historian records
how, even before the date when Pilate was sent to Judaea, when the provinces
appeared before Tiberius with complaints against their proconsuls, they took
care to throw in along with the usual accusations of rapacity the added charge
of treason — “Addito majestatis Crimine, quod tum omnium accusationum
complementum erat!” To Pilate, as a personal dependant on the favor of the
Emperor (a favor seemingly originally procured through Sejanus, who, if not
already hurled from power, was by this time tottering to his fall), all this
must have been continually and urgently present, the more as he had already
earned the hatred of his province, and dreaded its revenge. His fears were not
groundless. Tiberius was still upon the throne when, a few years after, Pilate
was superseded, and ambassadors from Palestine, relying on the hereditary
attachment of the nation to the imperial house, were sent to Rome to witness
against the recalled and degraded governor. The shadow of that distant day
paralyzed Pilate on this morning. What if he were to be accused before Caesar of
spoliation and bloodshed, and, too well knowing himself to be guilty of those
wrongs, should read also in the sunken eyes of his judge that other charge, the
complement and the crown of every lesser crime? He who had so long persisted
against all other arguments now succumbed at once before the well-chosen words:
“If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend’ whosoever maketh himself
a king speaketh against Caesar.” He ascended the tribunal, from which alone, a
final sentence could be legally pronounced by a Roman judge — in the present
case, apparently, a portable seat carried out from the Praetorium and placed in
front upon a lithostroton or tesselated pavement. Yet even here he relieved his
bitter feelings by the words to the accusers, “Shall I crucify your King?” But
on the chief priests making the historical answer, “We have no king but Caesar,”
the judge turned to Him who had claimed another kingdom, and, in such words as
“Ibis ad crucem,” delivered him to be crucified. “Was Pilate right in crucifying
Christ?” The question was put in the last generation in a book of extraordinary
ability, which opens with the most powerful attack in our language on what has
been known in modern times as the right of “liberty of conscience.” If you deny
that right, argued John.

Stuart Mill and others, you must approve of Marcus Aurelius and the other
persecutors of Christianity — nay, you must go farther, and find “a principle
which will justify Pontius Pilate.” Sir James F. Stephen accepted the challenge;
and his argument, while it in the first place raises the question, Did Pilate do
right as a judge and as a man? will lead us on to the farther question, What was
the law under which this judge ought to have acted? “Was Pilate right in
crucifying Christ? I reply, Pilate’s paramount duty was to preserve the peace in
Palestine, to form the best judgment he could as to the means required for that
purpose, and to act upon it when it is formed. Therefore, if and in so far as he
believed in good faith and on reasonable grounds that what he did was necessary
for the preservation of the peace of Palestine, he was right.” 1. The suggestion
which is here made, that Pilate may have “believed in good faith that what he
did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine,” is purely
gratuitous. Whether that would have justified him in condemning a man he
believed to be innocent, we may touch upon hereafter. But in the meantime there
is not the slightest ground for the suggestion itself. The narratives are
uniform in asserting his expressed conviction of his prisoner’s innocence, his
knowledge that Jesus had been delivered “for envy,” his scoffing incredulity in
speaking to the Jews of their King, and his final yielding, as a judge, to those
vanae voces populi against which his own law warned him, and yielding to them
too, only when his personal and private interests were at last menaced. Now, the
Christian narratives which have handed this down are, strange to say, in no
respect hostile to Pilate. Jewish and other writers who expressly treat of the
character of this governor give us his portrait as rapacious, cruel, and unjust.
The Christian historians give no portrait, and have occasion to refer to him
incidentally only where his actions are fitted to excite the keenest
exasperation. Yet the few historical side touches of the Evangelists restore for
us the man within the governor, with a delicacy, and even tenderness, which make
the accusing portrait of Philo and Josephus look like a hard, revengeful daub.
Is there, in the Tito or Bulstrode of modern delineation, anything more true to
nature, more provocative of sudden sympathy from men who know the pressure of
public life, than that morning’s mental history of the sixth procurator of
Judaea, as given by the friends of the man whom he crucified? The character of
Pilate and the motives for his vacillation are only too intelligible. But that
at any point of this vacillation he came to believe that his sentence was called
for to preserve the peace of the province, is an unhistorial suggestion. 2. Had
the history run at all in the direction suggested, there are various situations
which might be figured. That the judge, even if he were not a military governor
with merum imperium delegated from Rome, should slay a man who was overtly and
in intent seditious, raises no question. Neither Mr. Mill, nor any other
advocate of liberty, questions the duty of Government to preserve the peace.
That a governor, sitting or not sitting as a judge, should deliver to death a
man whom he believed to have no intentions against the peace, because he was in
point of fact dangerous to it, might raise a serious question. In particular, it
raises the distinction between the judicial and the administrative. What Pilate
as administrator of the province might do in the way of deporting or even
killing an innocent man for the sake of its peace, is one question. What he
might do sitting as a judge and inquiring whether there was “fault in this man
touching those things where of ye accuse him,” is another matter; and it is the
one with which we have to deal. The distinction, kept sacred in all
jurisprudences, might well be confused in the minds of English lawyers by the
powerful but provincial theory of Utility which they have been taught, but the
spread of which from the professor’s chair to the judgment-seat will, I think,
be prevented both by the scientific traditions of Europe and by the moral sense
of mankind. In saying so, I do not forget the story of the English judge who
told a prisoner, “I sentence you to die, not at all because you have robbed this
house, but in order that other people may not rob other houses in future.” That
judge, if he existed and pronounced such a sentence, simply committed murder.
But in the case with which we here deal we have not to do with such unjudicial
motives for action. It was Caiaphas, not Pilate, who thought it expedient that
one man should die for the people. And neither the one nor the other grounded
the expediency on any immediately apprehended outbreak or on any danger to the
peace.

There was indeed no such immediate danger. How far there might be ultimate
danger to the Roman State from the spread of convictions and the acceptance of
claims like those of Jesus, was another matter, and it was the really important
one. The true question, as the critic of the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity
watchword soon discerns, is between the universal supremacy of a Government
whose claims extended to something much higher than keeping the peace on the one
hand, and the claims of a kingdom not of this world on the other. 3.
Accordingly, the final defense made for the Roman governor — the only one which
can be of any weight in consistency with the history, and the only one also
which bears on the great question of liberty of conscience or repression of
opinion — is contained in the following passage of very general theory,
illustrated in the quotation in my notes: — “Pilate’s duty was to maintain peace
and order in Judaea, and to maintain the Roman power. It is surely impossible to
contend seriously that it was his duty, or that it could be the duty of anyone
in his position, to recognize in the person brought to his judgment-seat, I do
not say God incarnate, but the teacher and preacher of a higher form of morals
and a more enduring form of social order than that of which he was himself the
representative. To a man in Pilate’s position, the morals and the social order
which he represents are for all practical purposes absolute standards” (p.93).

Whether this was the theory of Roman law, we may afterwards see. But it is here
presented as the universal and true theory, against which it is difficult to
contend seriously. It may be so. This, at all events, is not the place to deal
directly with it, farther than by recording fundamental and implacable
opposition. But it is exactly the place to point out that this was the theory
which the defense of the accused seems directed to meet. The doctrine of the
powerful book from which we quote is that “skeptical arguments in favor of
moderation about religion are the only conclusive ones.” To suggest such
arguments to the governor, or at least to leave his mind to the skeptical poise
of the average educated Roman of the day, might have seemed the prudent part in
a prophet accused of treason. His words take directly the opposite course. Their
assertion of a kingdom — a higher and ruling “form of morals and social order” —
set up in the earth, but in a different plane and kosmos from the secular power
of Rome, might of itself have implied the proclamation of a duty to recognize
that kingdom. But when its assertion was backed by an immediate appeal to the
truth, as that which men are born into the world to confess, the defense plainly
resolved into a claim that this truth, and not any social order or traditional
belief, should be the “final and absolute standard.” And the last words
addressed to Pilate clench “the duty of anyone in his position to recognize the
teacher” of that higher order and extra-mundane truth; for “everyone that is of
the truth heareth my voice.” And even if we prefer to disbelieve this
conversation, we cannot escape from the fact that this was precisely the
attitude taken up historically by Christianity. It did not claim merely to be
one higher form of morals or religion among others. It claimed to be the true
religion — in the sense of being both universal and obligatory. And the Empire,
which would have been content to ignore it while it presented itself as simply a
higher form of morals or even of social order, could not ignore it when it
appeared as the universal and obligatory form. When it claimed to be the truth,
Rome first answered, “What is truth?” and when it insisted on the right of truth
to be obeyed, Rome answered again with persecution. And Christianity responded
by the constant reiteration of the duty of every member of the State, whether an
official or not, to recognize this truth, to bear witness to it, and, if need
be, to die for it. Hence the immense interest which has always attached to
Pilate’s answering inquiry. It was the utterance of one who was neither a
philosopher nor a statesman, but simply a typical Roman gentleman, in a position
where he represented his State. And precisely because it was so, his question,
“What is truth?” lays bare the hinge upon which the mighty Roman world was then
smoothly revolving towards the abyss. The Republic, we must never forget, was
destined ere long to disbelieve — many of its leading spirits had come to
disbelieve already — in its own morals and social order. The fact is certain,
but the pathos of it has too seldom been acknowledged. Again and again in the
past we have mused and mourned over Greece, and its search of truth intellectual
— its keen and fruitless search, never ending, ever beginning, across wastes of
doubt and seas of speculation lighted by uncertain stars. But today let us for
once remember that greater race, the greatest this earth has known; called and
trained through long centuries to the work of governing a world, and when at
last that mighty inheritance came into its hands, stricken with inward paralysis
for want of a motive and a hope.

Too well has our own poet drawn the picture — “In his cool hall, with haggard
eyes The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian
Way; “He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers:
No easier and no quicker passed The impracticable hours.” And so there crept
upon men that moral languor and satiety of life which underlay the whole time of
the Empire, and which often, even in the presence of a noble and protesting
stoicism, hardened into cruel apathy or reckless despair. But have we always
reflected how certainly this cynical moral mood of the dominant race was the
result of the new circumstances into which it was thrown? In early days the
Roman believed in himself, in his gods, in his institutions, and, above all, in
his State. It was for him theatrum satis magnum — his standard, his rule, his
righteousness. And so he was righteous, in his stern, relentless way. But now
the world had grown wider. And what had sufficed for virtue in former times did
not suffice for virtue now. A provincial belief, a national religion, was too
narrow for a world: it necessarily collapsed, and left the lords of earth, with
strong hands and empty hearts, skeptical as to truth, and so lapsing from
righteousness. That this had become largely the result, even in the reign of
Tiberius, is admitted. And it was plainly a position of matters very unfortunate
for the application of the general rule suggested. That Pilate or Pliny, or any
Roman official, should have to refuse a higher order of morals which his
conscience approved, simply because his State believed in a lower, was hard
enough. But that such an official should have to refuse that higher morality or
religion, when both he and his State were ceasing to believe in the lower, was
harder still. And that in such circumstances a judge should have to use
systematic persecution against the confessedly higher convictions, simply to
prevent their making head against a legal standard of faith which he or others
had begun to disbelieve, was the most unfortunate thing of all. There is
probably nothing which so excites the loathing of mankind as when the State
persecutes for a faith which it has already begun to lose. And yet, obviously,
that is precisely the time when dishonest persecution is most likely to happen,
and on the theory with which we are dealing it is what ought to happen. Pilate
was quite prepared to act upon this theory, for in point of fact he acted from a
lower motive still — his private interest. But let us suppose that he had risen
so far as to desire only to do what was right, and let us suppose also that the
law he administered demanded the persecution of all convictions hostile to the
religion of Rome. It is fair that we also should answer the question, What ought
he in this case to have done? What in such circumstances was the “duty of a man
in Pilate’s position “? I answer that his duty was (having first cared for the
immediate peace of his district) to refuse to represent that law, and to resign
his position rather than outrage a principle of conscience, which lies deeper
than all social superstructures of either the Church or the State. But this
brings us to the final question: What, in point of fact, was the law of Rome in
the matter of the trial of Jesus Christ? Its fundamental principle was that the
public law of the imperial State had the right to permit or to forbid the
exercise of the religion of private men. In its exercise of this right, it was
no doubt generally cautious and wise, at least in its dealings with polytheistic
States. It is well known that the policy of Rome as a conquering power towards
the religions of subject peoples was one of toleration. But that meant little
more than toleration of existing religions in their local seats, or, at the
farthest, in the race to which such a religion properly belonged. Because the
worship of Serapis or Isis was tolerated on the Nile, as a monotheistic worship
was in Judaea, it by no means followed that either of them was permitted on the
banks of the Tiber. In order to be so, it required to be expressly authorized by
Rome — to become a religio licita . And even when it was tolerated throughout
the Empire, as the Jewish religion at this time was, — at least in the East, —
exclusive devotion to it was tolerated only in natives of the country from which
it came, and was at no time permitted to Roman citizens. For them, all over the
world the old religion was imperative; and for all others, the religion of the
Tiber, though not imperative, was dominant. The concessions made to the
provinces for their religions were strictly concessions, not concordats.
Accordingly, the concession was generally limited by the idea, Cujus regio ,
ejus religio . Outside the region or province where the local cult ruled — and,
in the case of Jews, outside the Jewish race — it was denied the rights of
publicity and of proselytism, and was restricted to a passive and a private
existence. These general considerations explain some of the variations in the
Roman treatment of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The old Jewish religion had
the paradoxical quality of being national or local on the one hand, while on the
other it claimed to be exclusive truth. The union of the two qualities went far
to explain that hostility to the human race which the Romans were fond of
ascribing to it. A faith which attacked that of all other men, without inviting
them to share in it, invited this misconstruction. But its very want of
aggressiveness saved it from collisions. When Christianity appeared, a different
problem had to be dealt with. Here was a faith which not only claimed to be the
absolute truth, but which refused to be confined within local limits. It was
essentially proselytizing, and therefore essentially public; and it demanded
universal individual acceptance — acceptance by the Roman as by the Greek and
the Jew. What was the answer of Roman law? “Non licet esse vos” — a refusal of
leave to exist. It was not always put in force. “The substance of what the
Romans did was to treat Christianity by fits and starts as a crime.” That
occasional persecution was not founded upon any specialties in the nature of
Christianity, or excited by any great dislike to it as a form of worship or
belief. It was persecuted generally as a form of seditious or innovating
atheism, or as opposition to the established and tolerated institutions. This
principle was expressed in the words said to be taken from the Twelve Tables:
“Separatim nemo habessit deos, neve novos; sed ne advenas, nisi publice
adscitos, privatim colunto.” And the principle was supported by later “leges” or
authoritative utterances, as when Marcus Aurelius denounced banishment against
all who troubled the light minds of men by inducing a dread of the Divine. The
opposition to Christianity on such grounds was set in motion and regulated by
some of the greatest and wisest, and even, in a sense, most tolerant emperors.
Trajan and the Antonines were wise and large-hearted monarchs. There was little
in Christianity to repel, and there was much in it to attract such men. They
were not bigots, and those around them were generally skeptics. They did not
believe in absolute or universal truth in matters of religion, but they did
believe in the sovereignty and supremacy of the Roman State. The consequence
was, that while they protected in Egypt and Palestine and Italy all religiones
licitae which would live side by side with each other, and claim no universal
dominion, they from time to time bent the whole force of the State against the
one religion which said, “For this cause are men born, that they should bear
witness unto the truth,” and “Every one that is of the truth heareth his voice.”
There is no way of explaining the history except by acknowledging that the
constitutional law of Rome reserved to the State the right on the one hand to
approve and license, and on the other to repress and forbid while unlicensed,
the expression of new religious convictions, the public existence of a new
faith. And this prerogative was held to form part of the majestas or supremacy
of the State.

It was so in the days of Tiberius as truly as in the Terreur juridique of
Domitian. Pilate, as his deputy, seems to have been convinced that the claim of
Jesus to be “Christ a King” was not a claim to temporal sovereignty. He accepted
in some sense his own assurance that it was a kingdom not of this world. Yet
this meant, at the least, that His kingdom was a religion which He was about to
found. It meant more. A religion which takes the form of a kingdom, with a king
and his noncombatant servants, however little “of this kosmos ” it may be, must
be not only religion, but a Church. A universal religion, starting with
individual faith, but adding immediately an obligation to love the brethren and
to proselytize, is already (according to the Protestant definition) a Church,
needing no visible center and no earthly head. The defense of Jesus gave at
least as much prominence to the Church idea as His disciples did during the
early ages; and in His case as in theirs it gave additional seriousness to the
charge of treason. A great student of history who has left us has perhaps gone
too far in holding that the Roman laws against unlicensed association or
combination were the unhappy root of all the persecutions, too far even in
holding that they were the instrument by which all these persecutions were
carried on. Those laws were the branches rather than the root, but they were in
living union with the root.

There can be no doubt that the laws regulating collegia , and repressing all
unlicensed associations, had from the beginning a close connection with the
majestas of the State, and especially with its right to institute and enforce
religion. The two things worked together, and they did so in theory and
practice. A claim of Jesus merely to found a universal religion might no doubt,
in practice, have come into collision with the law of Rome. But His claim to
found it as a kingdom, though not of this world — “une association dans l’etat
en dehors de l’etat,” as it is happily expressed — seems to me to have been
essentially inconsistent with the public principle of that law. Christianity, in
short, was incompatible with the Roman public law, and that not merely because
its contents were different from those of the old religion of Rome, but because
its claim to universal individual acceptance and public confession conflicted
with the unlimited and unbalanced sovereignty of the Roman State. Christianity
appealed to the individual conscience, and in order to its even taking root in
the world demanded liberty of conscience. But the Roman law, while it sometimes
permitted in practice a large amount of contemptuous toleration, was at all
times opposed to rights of conscience — opposed to them even in theory. And on
these very points, on which the Roman State was afterwards to come into conflict
with Christianity, it now came into conflict with the Author of Christianity. It
does not perhaps follow that Pilate, as its administrator, was bound at once to
condemn Jesus. As Trajan explains in his famous letter to the Governor of
Bithynia, it was the duty of the higher magistrate to use a certain discretion
in dealing with those who had transgressed the law on religion. And Pilate, who
had satisfied himself of the non-existence of any immediate conspiracy on the
part of the new faith, does not seem to have adverted to the future and
fundamental conflict between it and the law he represented. It is clear, indeed,
that he believed Jesus to be both just and harmless; and, so believing, he
sinned in corruptly swaying from his first judgment, and betrayed the innocent
blood. Yet had he adverted to the claim of his City to regulate religious
opinion and conscience, and compared it deliberately with the counter claims of
the prophet before him, or had he sent on his prisoner to answer for Himself at
the imperial tribunal, it seems certain that in either case the trial would
still have been followed by the tragedy which the world knows so well. Even the
gentle Pliny, under the express orders of the magnanimous Trajan, devoted to the
ax or the cross those whose obstinate refusal to recant and obey made them
unworthy of the leniency of Rome. And the “obstinacy” of generations of His
followers during the first three centuries found precedent and justification in
his who now stood to bear witness to the same truth. For in point of fact, when
Pilate ultimately sent Jesus to the cross, it was as claiming to be a King, and
on the original charge of acting adversus majestatem populi Romani . The
judgment, was legal, though the unjust judge did not believe in it. For whatever
Caesar’s deputy may have thought, the claim of Jesus was truly inconsistent with
the claim of the State which Caesar represented; and the world must judge
between the two.

I have recalled the most famous of all trials from a legal and almost formal
point of view. I have said nothing of its more memorable and characteristic
aspects, — how the authoritative love which had originally arrested the eyes of
disciples now deepened into an intenser glow, and a personality, which had
attracted in peaceful days only a few fellow-countrymen towered at the close
over suffering and shame so as henceforth to draw all men to Him. We have
omitted even what might seem nearer to our subject, — how the righteousness,
negatived by a condemnation to the cross, shone out in that darkness till it
became to subsequent generations not merely a center of admiration, but the star
of the world’s hope.

Yet, in considering so great a transaction in this external and forensic way, we
have come to some conclusions. We have found that it was a double trial,
conducted with a certain regard to the forms of the two most famous
jurisprudences of the world. In both trials the judges were unjust, and the
trial was unfair; yet in both, the right issue was substantially raised. Even
the form which that issue took was, in a sense, the same in both. Jesus Christ
was arraigned on a double charge of treason; the treason in the Theocratic court
being a (constructive) speaking against God, while in the Imperial court it was
a (constructive) speaking against Caesar. But under these tortuous traditions of
a twofold law the real historical question was twice-over reached, and the true
claim of the accused was made truly known. He died because in the ecclesiastical
council He claimed to be the Son of God and the Messiah of Israel, and because
before the worldwide tribunal He claimed to be Christ a King.


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/innes-alexander-the-trial-of-christ/
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